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by mushufasa 868 days ago
On the flip side, which large tech companies that have have an equally high velocity of shipping do this well?

Amazon?

1 comments

Mmm I don't really agree with the premise of the question at all. In my experience Google doesn't ship significantly faster than any other FAANG.

Meta for example ships extraordinarily quickly (see: Threads) but their products are considerably more tightly integrated and demonstrate an ability to leverage across the ecosystem (see: Instagram-Threads integration) that Google has trouble with.

More to the point (and extra points in favor of Meta for this): Google's apparent product velocity is a bit deceptive? The company ships a lot of ill-considered product. Is it superior product velocity if the product is consistently half-baked (and maybe more importantly: will die before it ever becomes fully baked)?

If you put those two factors together and consider product velocity as how quickly a company ships stuff that actually sticks (as opposed to a simple exercise in how quickly one can release code), Google's product velocity is IMO substantially inferior to all of FAANG. Meta, Apple, Amazon, and MSFT at this point are generating sticky product at a substantially greater pace.