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As a friend of mine says: When clear paths to grow a business diminish, organizations devolve into turf wars. Sounds like that's what's happening here.



I'm reminded of this quote:

> “If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or a better computer — so what?

When you have a monopoly market share, the company is not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people. And they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision-making forums. And the companies forget what it means to make great products. Sort of the product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.

https://www.bhooshan.com/2017/12/07/quotes-steve-jobs-lost-i...

Looking at what has happened to Google search, it's clear that either they no longer know what a good product is, or they only care about optimising for ad revenue and not customer experience.


Video of the extended Steve Jobs quote here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4

Very insightful.


What happened to Google search?


Sounds plausible for growth businesses.

But run-off businesses should be a different kettle of fish... (When does centralised black-bix search become one of those I wonder?)


I worked at Yahoo some time ago -- a run-off tech company if there ever was one. And you should have seen the turf battles. Astonishing.


Did Y! management think that it was a run-off business? Presumably not.


Non-growth businesses don't need much R&D


Not necessarily true IMHO. Maybe not as much as a full-on scale-up in its pomp, but optimising and sweating the remaining assets and market can be an honourable creative activity I think.




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