[dsl]

Google missed the boat because they only hired academics, not hackers.

They didn't need to embrace standards or build APIs, they just had to hire people who knew how to build products that real people outside the valley wanted. Google got lucky with its first product (search), acquired a company to make it a successful business (Adwords), and kept buying companies to try and onboard innovation.

[drakaal]

Keep telling your self that. Hackers rarely build things that scale to the size Google needs. A failure for Google has 10 Million signups the first day.

The Product managers are what count in building a new product. Hackers are rarely good product managers.

Academics are only a problem when they don't get user feed back before hand. A good researcher can build product that fits the needs of the users, and when paired with good UI people you get a winning product. Google isn't good at getting user feed back they work like Mathematicians, not like Anthropologists and Psychologists.

Math and Anthropology are still academics. But not in the same field.

[ajross]

YouTube and Android only count as "trying" to onboard innovation? Seems like the strategy has been working not so terribly to me. This sounds rather like praise via faint damnation...

[alan_cx]

Im not sure google have any clue what people want.

The general impression I get is that they facilitate hundreds and hundreds of projects, let them develop, and if it looks good, let them loose into the wild and see what sticks. Most people only get to see the successful ones. I think the vast majority of these projects never see the wild.

In contrast, I get the impression that other big tech companies lean towards thinking something up, then trying to push on to users.

Perhaps I've just fallen for PR, but thats the impression I get.

[davewiner]

Academics of all people should understand the value of having a wide open Internet tied together by search. I don't think that's where they went wrong. I think they let Facebook do their thinking for them, and Facebook has a fairly limited vision that's not at all friendly to the knowledge-building power of the web.