The Problem With Google’s Strategy For Everything

The best recap I read after Google’s big I/O conference came from Ars Technica, which pointed out the obvious flaw in Google’s vision this way: “by my count, ‘resurrecting the past’ accounted for around half of the company’s major announcements. In all of these cases, Google would be in a much stronger position if it had committed to a long-term plan and continuously iterated on that plan. Unfortunately, the company doesn’t have that kind of top-down direction. Instead, for most of the resurrected products, Google is trying to catch up to competitors after years of standing still.”

In contrast, Amazon continues to maintain a strong long term vision and execute on that vision to continually win and shape entire industries. Despite his character flaws, Jeff Bezos is a relentless strategic thinker and his long term mindset has undeniably paid off for Amazon. So what should Google do differently? In a word: persevere.

The biggest problem Google faces is giving up on good ideas too early and moving on to new initiatives too easily. Unfortunately, “all this work makes it seem like Google is trying to get back what it threw away,” instead of capitalizing on the prescient brilliance of their people who often seem to see the future before anyone else, and then seem to abandon it before they really know what they discovered.