Comment by Silhouette
11 years ago
In The Plex is great read for insight into their entire process. Basically, Google is run by people who have never been told "no" to anything in their lives, so they continue to think they are the best at everything until reality forces them to reconsider their delusional assumptions ("montessori naivety").
Which is unfortunate, because objectively Google doesn't actually have a very impressive track record of creating successful products and services given its size and resources. It has a goose that lays golden eggs (the on-line advertising business), two strong on-line services (search and mail, both over a decade old) and two well-established platforms (Android and Chrome, both nearly seven years old). Other than those, most things Google tries seem to land somewhere between unremarkable and complete failure, with Google+ surely the most obvious example of the latter. They also seem to be developing an unenviable reputation for killing things off as a result, which is going to make it more difficult for them to succeed with future endeavours. Whatever workforce their hiring process is producing for them, it doesn't seem to be one that is very good at creating successful new projects.
Triple up-vote for this. That said, As said before, I would say if they get more applications than anyone else, their pool of possibilities is larger, so, even if their hiring process is sub par, it's still possible to get more better people. They have a lot of good people and quite a few really good people. And, likely more of those really good people. Someone has done the numbers. It's a question of efficiency and maybe one of those smart ones is optimising it. It's quite possible that the process that looks shit on the outside is producing the right numbers.
Wait, only two strong online services? I can think of like five other excellent services including a maps site that is years ahead of the competition.
It seems we have different definitions of "excellent".
Google Maps is certainly widespread, but it's hardly the only on-line mapping service available. They keep messing around with the UI, often not for the better. I often find the data itself and the live route planning/traffic news to be inaccurate.
Maybe it's better for those in the US, but here in the UK it's exactly what I meant by unremarkable. The local data from OpenStreetMap seems to be just as good for general mapping purposes and sometimes more accurate and/or current, and for car journey planning and real-time traffic news the dedicated satnav devices still seem to do a far better job.
And Google Maps was built from acquisitions like Where 2 and Keyhole. Their data processing has improved vastly, but the product seems mostly unchanged.