| Hmm. Preface: I do not work at Google. > I would love to see one single company that isn’t dominating a market with no cash cow in-flow that can succeed without strict discipline, sharp focus, hard work, and hands-on management I've worked for plenty. I'm not going to name them because it's tactless, but they were both huge monolithic corporations and small-ish companies that were pretty profitable. I'm sure others have too. Those companies that you think to yourself, "how the fuck are we making money when we're so fucked up?". I wouldn't say it's a rare scenario. The idea of companies as "hyper-efficient market machines" is pretty laughable. In fact, I've met plenty of people who worked at IBM (the company he alludes to being one of these strict discipline companies) who said IBM was/is a complete mess. > why have the majority of initiatives at Google either failed or been financially inefficient and unprofitable The majority of initiatives full stop are failures, or unprofitable. This is kind of pointless without comparing Google to other companies. > When interacting with sales people at Google, I am shocked to see how untrained and inefficient they are This is admittedly one of Google's faults: they're awful at customer support and the like in general. Well known, but it seems to be working out fine for them. > If there are known companies with great sales cultures such as Oracle, Google is doing considerably better than Oracle in most senses of the word. One possible conclusion is the author's, that Google succeeds in spite of this because of their search monopoly. The alternative is that maybe a strong sales culture doesn't mean as much as the author thinks for the bottom line. > everything else in the Google world, you get $5 billion or 10 percent of Google’s revenue. Peanuts! Peanuts? Facebook's revenue last year was $8 billion. > Google is in a situation of monopoly with its search business Why do they continue to be a monopoly? There are certainly competitors. One explanation is because they continually offer the best results, because they hire the best software engineers, because they have free food, and offer "20% time", and etc... |