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Google’s biggest fear: Googlers

Consider this the sequel to my earlier post about 10 things that ex-Googlers could do.

Sometime back, CNN Money carried out a story about many Google employees deciding to sell their Google options, cashing out while the going was good.

Robert Cringely writes about the dangers (For Google) of Google’s much-hyped 20% time – the freedom given to Google’s employees to spend 20% of their time on working on new ideas.

Robert says out of 4000 or more probable new ideas that the Googlers come up with, in the end Google can’t take more than 10 new projects in a year, if it has to really make a good effort at successful execution.

Then there is the hurting reality, plaguing many Googlers that their company is still a one trick pony – Search Giant to Ad Giant.

How many more innovations still left in the giant?

What about the discarded 3990 (or more, or less) discarded ideas?

Let is put aside the pride of those bright PHDs, MBAs, for a while.

How long are Googlers going to be satisfied frolicking in the cool Googleplex ( great PR point) and bragging to others they aced 20 interview sessions (PR point#2) before they got in?

Someday I would like to learn in detail what exactly those thousands of the ‘nerd and the nerdiest’ do at Google, Microsoft or Yahoo?

What does that entire IQ go into?

However, that is another story, to be explored another time.

Robert talks about the possibility of frustrated Googlers, whose ideas have been discarded, leaving the company, selling their options and investing the money into a startup centered on their idea.

The possibility that their startup might be bought up by a giant, including Google, is full of delicious ironies, indeed.

Googlers leaving Google to start their own is not a fantasy.

Someday, business professors might call the phenomenon, ‘Creative Destruction, Google Style’.

Or 'How the Giant was beaten by his own'.
One of these companies might beat Google at their own, coming up with the next disruptive innovation to beat.

Labels: google, innovation, startup

posted by Pramit Singh @ 3:33 PM