Category Archives: Google

Management Improvement Carnival #127

Posted on April 2, 2011 by John Hunter

The Curious Cat Management blog carnival highlights recent management blog posts 3 times each month. The posts generally focus on the areas I have focused on in the Curious Cat Management Guide since 1996 (Deming, agile software development, systems thinking, lean manufacturing, customer focus…). Jim Womack, lean blog podcast #116 – Great, as you would expect. Includes a great explanation of the problems that have made adopting lean ideas in medicine, which somewhat counter-intuitively includes the reluctance to use the … Continue reading →

Posted in Carnival, Google, Management | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Is Google Failing Too Often?

Posted on January 11, 2011 by John Hunter

I think Google is extremely successful, but they do seem to consistently have problems adding to their portfolio. They did a great job with gmail. Android has been very successful. Google Maps is great. They did well building YouTube. Chrome is very nice. Automatic translation is very nice (as is the integration with Chrome). But so many things just don’t go anywhere. I can’t understand why they can’t take something like Google checkout and make it much more successful (there … Continue reading →

Posted in Google, Management, Software Development, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Net Neutrality, Policy, Economics and Intelligent Engineering

Posted on April 13, 2010 by John Hunter

I believe net neutrality should be championed to prevent decay of the usability of the internet. It seems to me internet connectivity is a natural monopoly that economic theory says should be a regulated monopoly. Smart countries have invested in providing much better internet connectivity that the USA has at much lower prices. Now in the USA we have companies that seek to control internet connectivity and then use that monopolistic control to favor higher margin efforts. So force those … Continue reading →

Posted in Economics, Google, Innovation, IT | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Observations of a New Googler

Posted on February 6, 2010 by John Hunter

Some interesting thoughts from a new Google engineer, Things I’ve learned at Google so far I would describe Google’s culture as “creative chaos”. There was some confusion about where I was supposed to be when I started. This resulted in the following phone call, “Hello?”, “Hello Ben, this is Conner (that’s my new manager), where are you?” “Mountain View.” “Why are you there?” “Because this is where the recruiter said to go.” “Good answer! Nice of them to tell me. … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Google, Innovation, IT, Management, Software Development | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Eric Schmidt on Google in 2010 and the Economy

Posted on December 3, 2009 by John Hunter

CEO Eric Schmidt Reveals ‘Centerpiece’ Of Google’s 2010 Strategy, speaking at the White House jobs summit. Google is definitely hiring. “We’re hiring a couple thousand people over the next year,” he said. And looking at the White House summit he said, “The basic message today is that with small business – which is the primary source of jobs – we need to figure out the loan problem. The banks aren’t really lending to them and anything that the government can … Continue reading →

Posted in Economics, Google | Tagged , , , ,

YouTube Uses Multivariate Experiment To Improve Sign-ups 15%

Posted on August 17, 2009 by John Hunter

Google does a great job of using statistical and engineering principles to improve. It is amazing how slow we are to adopt new ideas but because we are it provides big advantages to companies like Google that use concepts like design of experiments, experimenting quickly and often… while others don’t. Look Inside a 1,024 Recipe Multivariate Experiment A few weeks ago, we ran one of the largest multivariate experiments ever: a 1,024 recipe experiment on 100% of our US-English homepage. … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Data, Design of Experiments, Google, IT, Management, Process improvement, Quality tools, quote, Science, Software Development, Statistics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

The Myth of the Genius Programmer

Posted on June 29, 2009 by John Hunter

Nice talk on fear of looking foolish. The speakers discuss the idea that visibility is good. Don’t hide. Make everything visible and the benefit from many people’s ideas. The talk focuses on software development but is true for any work. “criticism is not evil” – Very true. “At Google we are not allowed to submit code until there is code review.” At the bottom line they are repeating Deming’s ideas: improve the system – people are not the problem, bad … Continue reading →

Posted in Google, Psychology, Respect, Software Development, Systems thinking, Theory of Constraints, webcast | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Google Innovates Again with Google Wave

Posted on June 25, 2009 by John Hunter

Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year. They are developing this as an open access project. The creative team is lead by the creators for Google Maps (brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen). A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. You really have to watch to understand what it is. This is a long webcast … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Customer focus, Google, IT, Management, Process improvement, Software Development, webcast | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Google’s Innovative Use of Economics

Posted on May 24, 2009 by John Hunter

Secret of Googlenomics: Data-Fueled Recipe Brews Profitability Google depends on economic principles to hone what has become the search engine of choice for more than 60 percent of all Internet surfers, and the company uses auction theory to grease the skids of its own operations. All these calculations require an army of math geeks, algorithms of Ramanujanian complexity, and a sales force more comfortable with whiteboard markers than fairway irons. … Varian tried to understand the process better by applying … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Data, Economics, Google | Tagged , ,

Google Should Stay True to Their Management Practices

Posted on December 9, 2008 by John Hunter

I believe in Google’s past, present and future. They have shown a great ability to ignore the short term focus that dominates (and kills success) of so many companies today. I am happy to invest in Google for the long term. This current reaction to the economic crisis, is one of many times Google can be seen to be making significant changes to adapt based on market conditions and the results of their experiments and experiences. Google’s management in general … Continue reading →

Posted in Google, Management, quote | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Eric Schmidt on Management at Google

Posted on November 24, 2008 by John Hunter

Eric Schmidt speaks at the Management Lab Summit on May 29, 2008 in Half Moon Bay, California. Conversation with Professor Gary Hamel. “The culture can be thought of as a ship and iterate culture with transparency for what people are doing. And that model scales pretty well.” “I have two jobs, two roles. The first is to make sure every issue that is important is really debated to find, not the common outcome, but the best decision… second thing is … Continue reading →

Posted in Career, Creativity, Google, Management, Popular, Software Development, webcast | Tagged , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Lame Move by Google

Posted on November 2, 2008 by John Hunter

Google does great things and makes good decisions most often. However a recent move on their part has ended very lamely. As part of what their 10th anniversary celebration they provided a search of the 2001 index (the oldest index they could find to search now). This was extremely cool. Now if you go to find it so you can try it out you will be disappointed. Search for it on Google you will find a link to Google Search … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Google, IT | Tagged , , , , ,

The Power of Small Teams

Posted on August 20, 2008 by John Hunter

The power of small teams [broken link was removed] by Avi Muchnick Choose a project that is simple to implement. Don’t try to create a complex suite of applications… Focus on solving a single problem. Philip Kaplan made email more efficient to use by stalling it instead of managing it. Dead simple approach and a great idea.Take the easier approach when possible. Choose people that can wear multiple hats. Can your designer code? Can your programmer manage a community? Can … Continue reading →

Posted in Google, Management, Process improvement, Systems thinking | Tagged , ,

Google Knows it is a 2.0 World

Posted on June 27, 2008 by John Hunter

You can accomplish a great deal by just talking to people. Google Public Relations: I did not really expect it, but the next day I got a call from Jeffrey Korn at Google California. He explained that he was the one responsible for building the Google Bookmarks and Google Web History tools. The problem with my extension was something I hadn’t imagined: a scaling problem. Hehe, Google had scaling problems :-). The gBrain extension creates a lot of bookmarks. Several … Continue reading →

Posted in Google, Innovation, Management | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Deming’s 14 Points (for software development)

Posted on March 28, 2008 by John Hunter

Deming’s 14 points (for software development) by Jamie Dinkelacker (Geo/Maps Engineering Program Manager at Google Inc. Focus on lean principles and agile practices for software development): W. Edwards Deming’s work on quality, while widely misinterpreted and misapplied in the USA, was nonetheless a watershed that Japanese companies, especially Toyota, took to heart… Below are Deming’s 14 points accompanied by commentary related to software development. … Design quality in, don’t use inspection to find errors. Mistake proof the system. … In … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Google, Management, Software Development | Tagged , , , ,

User Happiness with Search Engines

Posted on February 23, 2008 by John Hunter

Awhile back I wrote about why I didn’t think the American Customer Satisfaction Index claim that Yahoo beat Google for customer satisfaction was evidence of a broken indicator. Well here is another indicator, but this time it puts Google clearly in 1st place, while Yahoo has been improving: Search Engines: Intense Competition Drives Better User Experiences In the December 2007 Keynote study, Google makes a clean sweep of first place in all four key index rankings: Overall Customer Experience, Brand … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Google, Management