Huh, interesting that people here don't seem to be getting this article.
Every organization has a culture, and every culture has blind spots: things that it doesn't value and is not good at. Because it doesn't value them, it doesn't bring in people who are good at them. Because it doesn't have people who know about them to remind everybody else about them, it continues not to value them.
The only way out of this is for senior management to realize that their beliefs about how to build a company -- the very foundation of their success to this point -- are now what is limiting them.
In this case, Google has gone massively overboard on hiring engineers, and has neglected designers, UX experts, human factors experts, people who understand the "soft side" of computing. What they need to do is to bring a bunch of such people in and give them power. But their whole hiring process is built around finding the very best engineers; they have no process for hiring "soft side" experts. Worse, they have nobody who even knows how to evaluate such people.
Now if Page realized all this, he could do something about it. But to realize it he has to see the limitations in his existing beliefs about who he wants working at Google, about what skills are important. He has to realize he needs people unlike himself. And he has to make a fundamental change in his vision of what kind of company Google is and how it can be most successful. It is very rare to see a CEO with the level of self-reflection to be able to make changes like that.
Google has gone massively overboard on hiring engineers, and has neglected designers, UX experts, human factors experts, people who understand the "soft side" of computing.
It's often said that Google's weakness is the human side, and I agree, but what's not clear is whether Facebook is so culturally different. Much of what I hear about Facebook indicates a hacker culture that is not dissimilar to Google's engineering culture in this respect, i.e. not necessarily "softer" in the way you describe. Do Facebook emphasize "human factors experts"?
There are people here who have worked at both companies. I'd like to hear some comparisons on this point.
This is not the insider view you're hoping for, but I think Zuckerberg is a different kind of hacker from Page and Brin. He seems to have a much better instinct for UX and for what users want. I'd wager, based admittedly on little evidence, that he has much more of an artist's soul. Page and Brin seem much more like pure engineers.
I don't know if this answers your question, but Zuckerberg often answers in questions that machine-driven data is often not good enough, and there needs to be core social elements in a technology to delivery quality data for many applications.
What that means in practice, who knows, but with Google's engineer-heavy focus, I would venture to guess that Google at least is (and has been) heavily focused on a machine-driven philosophy.
More anecdotally, I find that the best design and illustration I've seen from Google is usually on a very small thing: Google doodles, the CR-48 pilot program videos and illustrations, the Google TV quick tour. Some amazing work has gone into Chrome marketing.
But it's almost never on a product. Their products often feel like the design was managed by committees of engineers. That's not to knock any of Google's product designers, but it often feels like they're not allowed to make decisions on anything that really matters.
I'm going to continue my troll comments from last one that likens YC to American Idol to blaming Marissa Mayer for Google's current predicament.
In 2009 she was Vice President of Google Search Products & User Experience. It's 2011 and there's still no Maps selector in search. How long did it take to get blog search as a selector? Years. She's been VP of Location and Local Services since October 2010 - she lost that to 4sq.
Reading Willfred's article below from 2009 makes me think that he could've seen the cap that Mayer might've been placing on Google's UI. He writes: "But I won’t miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data" vs wikipedia article "She acts as a gatekeeper for their product release process, determining when or whether a particular Google product is ready to be released to users."
Beware of some power blondes - will write off everything they touch, and block out those that can do something useful.
Let her go. She's the old Google.
Google, like with Facebook, acquire to hire - make entrepreneurs replace the old guard.
It's very analogous to Microsoft's situation earlier this decade: the hiring process, power structure, and rewards have been optimized for years around a certain kind of person with certain skills. Now, other people with different skills are just as important -- but the people in power have blind spots about what will motivate or attract that kind of person, or make them effective once they're there.
Dennis Crowley has to be one of the single best examples of jdp23's point. Google bought 4square v1 nee Dodgeball, and had one of the people with what seems to be the best insights into social / gamification / local in house. That he left so pissed at Google really understates how hostile Google is to people who aren't amazing technologists. Social seems to require a different type of person / knowledge / skills, and Google seems incapable of hiring, promoting, and supporting anything but technologists.
Letting dodgeball languish and pushing Crowley out of Google really ought to be the subject of a bunch of management self reflection and probably even some firings, all the way up to the CEO level.
If the problem was a company-wide cultural mismatch, it strikes me as somewhat absurd to declare that the answer is to fire the people who happened to be posted near the border of that mismatch. That doesn't fix anything.
Social is apparently so important that one of the founders of Google has concluded their lack of it is an existential threat. What should the punishment then be for execs of Google fucking up one of their best shots at social? Setting and/or changing the culture is one of an executive's jobs.
Punishment is overrated. The blame game is a game with no winners.
The new CEO is setting a new tone, new structure and new priorities. Getting rid of people who fail to adopt the new vision is fine and reasonable. Firing people for pre-pivot problems isn't.
Frankly, I think your suggested action would have one major effect: killing innovation.
After all, who would dare to innovate if they knew that if the project failed (no matter if the cause was them, or if it was a company-wide cultural issue) that you might capriciously fire them, long after the fact?
Every organization has a culture, and every culture has blind spots: things that it doesn't value and is not good at. Because it doesn't value them, it doesn't bring in people who are good at them. Because it doesn't have people who know about them to remind everybody else about them, it continues not to value them.
The only way out of this is for senior management to realize that their beliefs about how to build a company -- the very foundation of their success to this point -- are now what is limiting them.
In this case, Google has gone massively overboard on hiring engineers, and has neglected designers, UX experts, human factors experts, people who understand the "soft side" of computing. What they need to do is to bring a bunch of such people in and give them power. But their whole hiring process is built around finding the very best engineers; they have no process for hiring "soft side" experts. Worse, they have nobody who even knows how to evaluate such people.
Now if Page realized all this, he could do something about it. But to realize it he has to see the limitations in his existing beliefs about who he wants working at Google, about what skills are important. He has to realize he needs people unlike himself. And he has to make a fundamental change in his vision of what kind of company Google is and how it can be most successful. It is very rare to see a CEO with the level of self-reflection to be able to make changes like that.