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How Google Works by David F. Carr
An interesting look at the technology system behind Google.
Google was driven from the beginning by engineers that sought to do what was best. Since those engineers were the founders of the company and still run the company Google has been able to keep the focus not on what is accepted as conventional wisdom but what actually works best. Google understands when you experiment things might not work our. Google’s solution is to experiement quickly and fail early (turn the pdsa cycle quickly). That is something every organization can apply.
The advantage will erode over time, and Google will eventually run up against the limits of how much homegrown technology it can manage, Valdes predicts: “The maintenance of their own system software will become more of a drag to them.”
But Google doesn’t buy this traditional argument for why enterprises should stick to application-level code and leave more fundamental technologies like file systems, operating systems and databases to specialized vendors. Google’s leaders clearly believe they are running a systems engineering company to compete with the best of them.
Google is a fascinating company to read about. But they are also significantly different. You can’t copy the methods they use. Very few companies are going to benefit by writing their own file systems and operating systems. However, in those instances where your organization should pursue customized solutions can you.
The scope of those customized solutions at Google are inspiring, in part because of their scope. What most can learn from Google is that those who claim certain things are not possible or practical are not always right. Of course, there are many examples of companies that fail trying to be different so those that urge caution are not always wrong either.
How much of what you spend time on could benefit from thinking in this way: “instead of making things easier for the computer, Google’s approach is to make things easier for the user”? In my experience a great deal. This is something most organizations would claim they would aim to do. The difference is in what they actually do, not what they aim to do.
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July 22nd, 2006 at 10:52 am
The usability and speed are what gives google.com the edge.
August 8th, 2006 at 11:23 pm
[...] Sounds like Google today, see: How Google Works focused on engineering and Enginners at Google Make Decisions. I was partly hardware and partly software, but, I’ll tell you, I wrote an awful lot of software by hand (I still have the copies that are handwritten) and all of that went into the Apple II. Every byte that went into the Apple II, it had so many different mathematical routines, graphics routines, computer languages, emulators of other machines, ways to slip your code in and out of an emulation mode. It had all these kinds of things and not one bug ever found. Not one bug in the hardware, not one bug in the software. And you just can’t find a product like that nowadays. But, you see, I had it so intense in my head, and the reason for that was largely because it was part of me. Everything in there had to be so important to me. This computer was me. And everything had to be as perfect as could be made. And I had a lot going against me because I didn’t have a computer to compile my code, my software. [...]
August 16th, 2007 at 9:56 pm
I believe Google offers a great deal for managers to study - see our posts on Google management practices. But that is not the same as reinventing corporate management. Most companies have no way of just replacing their management system with a “Google management system”…