Google’s Greatest Strength May Be the Luxury of Failure

That would be an interesting conclusion if there was a good reason to believe it, but the article didn't make much of a case. How many of Google's off-the-wall projects are contributing to their 30% year-over-year quarterly revenue growth? Most of the projects mentioned were either market failures or haven't been released yet. Android was clearly a success, but it wasn't a great example of innovation: it was basically a clone of a successful existing product.

There's probably a more prosaic explanation for Google's success relative to Facebook. Both companies make most of their revenue from advertising, but Google developed AdWords, which leveraged Google's search infrastructure to became an essential piece of infrastructure for the buying and selling of ads. It's hard to name any other company that got rich off of web ads besides Google. Google is entrenched in the fabric of the internet, while Facebook is an upstart that's primarily just a website, like Yahoo was 15 years ago. At that time, Microsoft was the giant that owned the critical infrastructure, and they were doing very similar things as Google is now: Microsoft created MSN to compete with AOL and Yahoo; Microsoft leveraged its infrastructure to crush a threat from an upstart competitor -- Netscape. Building out, as much and as fast as you can, seems to be the winning strategy when you are in a position of overwhelming dominance as a result of owning essential infrastructure.

The "Luxury of Failure" is the actual lesson here. You get the luxury of failure when you own a revenue stream that's big and entrenched enough that you have the luxury to do essentially anything you want, even lose money. It's hard to compete against that.

I realize you worked there for a few months a few years ago, but I think someone might have been pulling your leg if they told you that phrase. (But you're right, like most meetings at Google, calibration meetings do happen in rooms. They're just normal conference rooms, though. Nothing special.)

For everyone else: calibration is a process where other managers at Google cross-check the performance scores given to employees across different teams and parts of the company. We do this so that an individual manager can't introduce undue bias or play favorites, and so an engineer at a given level in one part of the company is more or less the equal of an engineer at the same level in another part.

Calibration is one part of the system I think works really well, much better than any other place I've worked. In fact, I think more companies might want to emulate it.

Dude google is not going to change or issue an apology because a former employee rags on them on the internet... you do realize this right?