Friday, November 12, 2010

Does Google Have An Innovation Problem?

Photo of Robert Scoble, an American blogger, t...Image via Wikipedia
Robert Scoble: Why Google can’t build Instagram: (I was working at Microsoft as Flickr got bought by Yahoo, Skype got bought by eBay, etc etc). ..... Google, internally, knows it has an innovation problem .... is looking to remake its culture internally to help entrepreneurial projects take hold...... how Larry Ellison actually got efficiencies from teams. If a team wasn’t productive, he’d come every couple of weeks and say “let me help you out.” What did he do? He took away another person until the team started shipping and stopped having unproductive meetings. .... At Google you can’t use MySQL and Ruby on Rails .... Google Wave failed, in part, because it couldn’t keep up with the first wave of users and got horribly slow .... Small teams rule
Google is going to fail in the innovation department if it feels like it has to be number one in every emerging trend. On the other hand, it could keep going into new sectors of the economy like it has shown a tendency to do. Google can't beat Facebook on social, but it can beat Facebook and every other web company on wind farms and clean cars.

When you make innovation an ego issue, you will hit road bumps.

Google has plenty going for it. It has Android, it has Chrome OS. Those two alone are two Google size companies. So why feel bad?

One area Google could really take a lead on is the wireless broadband space. Can you make it 100 times faster and 10 times cheaper and go global with the idea? That would not be a complete departure from search like wind farms and clean cars are. And it would still be a big enough departure that, I mean, no one is doing anything in that space.

Google needs to move into the ISP space. Google, like no other company, could turn the ISP business upside down. Make it completely ad supported. Make it fast. Make it free. Make it ubiquitous. That one leap would leave everyone else in the dust. And it would be greaaat for its search business.

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...Image via CrunchBase
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