Here's a video of Marissa Mayer at Stanford outlining Google's philosophy about product and innovation. She lists nine points from:
- Ideas come from everywhere
- Share everything you can
- You're brilliant we're hiring
- A license to pursue dreams
- Innovation not instant perfection
- Data is a-political
- Creativity loves constraint.
- Don't Kill Projects, Morph them
- Users not money
Listening to Marissa and her anecdotes about Google products immediately brought to mind Paul Kedrosky's recent plainative wailing about how Google should clean up their development process and finish 'em dammit!
I think Marissa's infectious enthusiasm and her key points stand up pretty well with respect to developing products and innovation - especially the parts about instant perfection, users & money and not killing projects.
Google's weakness is not its innovation process - it's a strength. In my opinion, it's biggest threat is hubris. Marissa's confidence about the greatness of Google's culture gives a bit of pause.
Update: During the questions, Marissa says that "on a good day" users do 7-10 searches. Then she says that Orkut, MySpace, etc get an average of 100 page views a day per user. Yet another Google exec obsessed with MySpace...
¶ 5/18/2006
