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Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

According to various sources, Larry Page had occasion to speak with Steve Jobs and ask his advice--in general terms--a few months before Jobs' death. Jobs originally wasn't inclined to give Page his time (he was still bitter about Android) but felt that, as he had reached out to an earlier generation of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs himself, he should pay it forward.

Jobs' advice was to focus on the most important products and prune the rest. It appears Google is now following this advice.

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Works great for a company that risks generating a lot of noise to consumers (i.e. producing and marketing physical products). But for Google it's pervasiveness and breadth of services were part of the appeal, it's not like it's minor products interfered with the major parts of the company nor cost them much to maintain.

The niche services that have been killed were (by definition) used by small groups, groups which tend to be over-represented here and on other tech-oriented outlets. Even a service like Reader was something that only a small number of people used (compared to e.g. gMail).

One way to look at it is that these services are now validated (if small) market needs that smaller entrepreneurs can pursue. In the past, entrepreneurs lived in fear that Google would muscle in on their specialty; now it looks like they not only won't do that, but are in fact disengaging from things that do not have mass market appeal.

I agree that Jobs' advice was a mismatch for Google. Trying a million things and seeing what sticks, like an incubator, is a better idea for Google. The problem is when that turns into Microsoft-esque trend chasing. But that only happens when upper management focuses on trend chasing. Otherwise they just end up as passing experiments.

I call it the Spaghetti Cannon Strategy.

Load up a cannon full of ideas, fire and see what sticks.

Microsoft were doing it before Google, but the financial-strategic dynamics of those businesses is very similar.

There's a fountain of cash and a series of spaghetti cannons around it blasting away furiously. Almost nothing sticks. But that's OK, because there's just so much money.

Microsoft also fell into the trend-chasing trap before Google. It's a very fine line, though. Excel was probably trend-chasing at its time, but they were doing so many things at once back then that going head-to-head with Lotus 1-2-3 wasn't a bad idea to throw in there. Whereas stuff like Windows Phone or Zune seemed like major strategic shifts dictated from the top, not just "oh let's make one of those too".

The corollary of the spaghetti strategy is that if something doesn't stick, you kill it. Taking Jobs' advice is really just setting a higher bar for sticking.

Google+ didn't stick. It's more about choosing your own priorities to focus on, and while Apple was great at that, Google made a shit decision with G+ and are sticking with it obstinately.

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