Is Google far too much in love with engineering?

The question should be: Is cluelessness in "soft skills" worse than technical cluelessness? Really, both are bad. (Example: Cuil)

>However, I wonder whether such slight, but no doubt data-driven, infelicities, such as the launch of Google Buzz, the riotously misguided home page designs, or the launch of Nexus One, might have done with one or two fewer data-driven managers and one or two more people who offered suggestions about what real people like and how they might react?

It's very easy to look at a company like Google and find examples of significant failures.

Though actually, I think the 'failures' he brings up are not quite the failures he thinks they are. They're not actually data-driven decisions. They're data-collecting experiments. Google is in no way wedded to any given device or approach. It's pivot, pivot, pivot, often in eight directions at once. Releasing a polished product with top-notch marketing is a good way to make a lot of money in the short term, but your customers get very attached to what you've given them, and it makes it a lot harder to innovate in the long term.

Right. The Nexus One is a working, production, reference implementation of what an Android phone SHOULD be, not something Google expected to make them rich.

Well that makes the point of focusing too much on the engineering side...corporations are for-profit entities and they are not there to make the "perfect" product but rather a marketable product that will generate them net positive cash flows...after all, if you are a shareholder of Google, you expect them to MAXIMIZE their earnings, not just make things for the fun of it, or cause its interesting (example: the free optical network they want to give to a select bunch of small to medium-size cities...)

Google's success wasn't so much coming up with the best web search technology but finding a way of converting that to billions of dollars in revenues and profits.

To me Google have excelled at both the technology and the marketing - which is why they are so successful.

Having said that, if you can't manage to be good at both technology and marketing, I suspect that you are better off being weak at technology than marketing. Plenty companies thrive with average/poor technology but an excellent understanding of what the market wants. I've known plenty companies (some from the inside) where the technology was good but the marketing was weak - things generally don't turn out too well.