[chrisacky]

I had no idea that that Diego worked on Inktomi. Although it makes sense why IndexTank worked fantastically.

If I had to pick one reason why Google triumphed (and you can only pick one), I think it would be their Page Rank algorithm. It added that extra bit of awesome-sauce to and already tasty stew.

[silvestrov]

I'd say: The Google CEO's have the point of view from an end user.

The Inktomi managers had the point of view of a generic MBA.

Everything followed from that difference of view.

[Produce]

I would modify that to read (since this article even stated that the engineers there found this to be obvious):

>The Google CEO's have the point of view of an engineer.

And, more generally:

>The Google CEO's have the point of view of the people doing the actual work.

The lesson to take away from this is that one shouldn't try to manage what one can't do themself. The disconnect between the manager and the problem domain becomes too great and they end up making ridiculous decisions since they are acting on the wrong information.

[wpietri]

I'd disagree on a couple of points.

First, engineers very often build crappy products when left to their own devices. The ones that they do the best at are ones where they are also the users and are more or less representative of the target audience. Google's a great example, and so is Firefox. So I think Google execs' perspective as a user was much more important. Consider as contrast Google Plus, which definitely was not built because was an avid but dissatisfied Facebook and Twitter user.

I think your second point is almost right. You should never try to control things you don't understand. It's ok to manage things you don't understand, because good management in that case is not directing the people who understand, but supporting them in achieving common goals.

As a non-tech example, few hospital administrators can perform brain surgery. But that's fine as long as they ask the brain surgeons what they need rather than telling them how to work.

[pja]

Did Google actually have revenue at that point in time? They bought Applied Semantics (for adsense / adwords) in what, 2003? (edit: mlinksva points out that they introduced adwords at the end of 2000)

Inktomi management would probably have had to raise capital on a risky pivot whilst at the same time dropping all of their existing revenue streams in order to compete head to head with Google who at that point didn't even have a way to monetise their technology.

That's a hard thing for any company to do: In this case it would have been the right choice, but it's far easier to say that with the benefit of perfect hindsight.

[mlinksva]

AdWords launched in 2000. Google bought Applied Semantics in 2003 and launched AdSense.