5 Reads A Week (#02): Inside Google
"Velocity, execution and focus
Sergey and I founded Google because we believed that building a great search experience would improve people’s lives and, hopefully, the world. And in the decade-plus that’s followed, we’ve been constantly delighted by the ways in which people have used our technology.
Excellence matters, and technology advances so fast that the potential for improvement is tremendous. So, since becoming CEO again, I’ve pushed hard to increase our velocity, improve our execution, and focus on the big bets that will make a difference in the world.
Google is a large company now, but we will achieve more, and do it faster, if we approach life with the passion and soul of a start-up."
(The above excerpt from Google’s Investor page. More here : https://investor.google.com/corporate/2012/ceo-letter.html)
Whether it's building self-driving cars, a fleet of balloons to blanket the world with the Internet or tiny particles to detect cancer, Google is known for thinking big — really big. Here we take a look into the company and understand its culture and what drive the company. In the light of the recent massive re-organisation, we also take a sneak peep as to what the future holds for Google.
The ultimate search engine would basically understand everything in the world, and it would always give you the right thing. And we're a long, long ways from that. - Larry Page
Personally, this company continues to inspire me every single day. Its vast plethora of products just keep making our lives simpler everyday. The vast majority of product conceptualization and execution almost seem flawless.
1. How Google Grows...And Grows...And Grows
This is an old article which first appeared in April 2003. Let’s take a look at the culture of Google in its earlier days, the kind of that Google was experiencing those days and understand better as what all ingredients made Google tick and grow in those days.
2. Google reveals its 9 Principles of innovation
The most successful Internet company of our time turns 17 this year. Much like a teenager trying on various identities, it's determined to be more than a search engine, although Google is best known for that deceptively simple function, and more than an advertising platform, although the vast majority of its revenue comes from ads. Here, we take a look at some of the key ingredients that make Google an innovation hub. A lot of factors have influenced the way Google is what it is today; and as it continues to prepare itself for bracing next generation technologies and keeps diversifying itself into new products.
3. Google raising its stakes on diversity
Google is raising the stakes in its bid to attract more women and minorities. It's not just the dollar amount but Google's "holistic" strategy to make the tech industry more representative of the populations it serves — from routinely testing hiring, promotion, performance-evaluation and compensation programs for fairness, to embedding engineers at a handful of historically black colleges and universities where they teach students and advise on computer science curriculum.
4. Chasing the next billion with Sundar Pichai
In this interview with The Verge (in May,2015), Pichai talks about the next billion people about to come online with smartphones. Pichai talks about the improvements in Google’s products through machine learning. Of late, a lot of resources of Google have been spent extensively on machine learning. Pichai also talks about how his company would serve “the next billion”.
5. Why Google's Alphabet shakeup makes sense
An insight into Google’s recent massive reorganisation. On the surface, the only difference is the name. But the new division between Google and Alphabet is more complex than a simple name change, and it may allow two increasingly separate halves of the Google empire to drift ever further apart. So what does Google — or Alphabet — get out of all of this?