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Don't forget the other major class of engineer problems: trying to automate the Human Interaction.

A lot of engineers (myself formerly included) think that Google emerged as a multi-billion dollar company directly from the head of Jeff Dean...ignoring the critical role that things like biz dev (getting that first yahoo deal!) played in their massive success.

One of the hardest lessons I've had to learn in life is that success has very little to do with engineering. The technical side needs to be just good enough to work. The rest comes down to marketing and networking.

> One of the hardest lessons I've had to learn in life is that success has very little to do with engineering. The technical side needs to be just good enough to work. The rest comes down to marketing and networking.

My understanding is that Google started getting traction because the technology savvy crowd embraced the search engine early on. This was because the search engine was built on a technology foundation that was solid and delivered great results. I think all pieces must come together to achieve success (luck being a piece) but saying engineer had little to do with Google's success doesn't seem correct to me.

I disagree.

Read Steven Levy's book ("Inside the Plex"). It provides an alternative narrative to the one most engineers believe. In particular, it says that Google had good early traction from technology people, but the Yahoo deal is what made them mainstream.

For those not old enough to remember, (I believe) this is the Google-Yahoo deal referenced: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2066171/Yahoo-Partners-...

You are definitely right, however the way Google became Google and stays ahead of the others is a clear exception of this.

Technology matters, it matters too much that Microsoft with millions of dollars cannot build a better search engine. Microsoft would spend a billion if they knew they can do as good as Google.

There are small companies as well that solely focus technical excellence.

If you are going to rely on technology only then your technology shouldn't be just slightly better it should be way better than the others.

There have been blind user studies that show that users like Bing's results as much as Google's when the logo is removed (if not more).

You don't realize it, but you're making an argument for the strength of their branding, which is at least partially (if not entirely) due to the amount Google spends to be the default search engine in just about everything. Yes, they have to have good search results, but that's far from the whole story.

I wonder what was the audience of those studies, to me it sounds insane that Bing is as good as Google, but maybe you are right, I'm brain-washed by the Google brand.

These sorts of mistakes get made even at google. Not every product is websearch.

Especially at Google. Everything has to be ready for a billion customers on day one. While this works great for a lot of products, I contend this is one of the big reasons why they have a lot of problems with social.

The great social networks find a band of early adopters who get to know each other on that system, and they all figure out what this thing is, while the dev team responds to what they do, just as fast. At least at the start, it's like a little coffeehouse that a clique discovers and makes their own, and starts holding events there.

When Google launches a social product it's like going to the opening of a mall. The place is glitzy, but you're lost in the crowds.

Out of pure curiosity, why couldn't Google just invite a few thousand people as a kernel to try things out? Wouldn't be that hard to find a couple of social supernodes and their friends, beween GMail and AdWords...

My information is way out of date, but I believe most Google products are still tested that way. There's a long Googler-only incubation period for everything. And Robert Scoble was probably on Google+ months before you knew about it.

The people at Google aren't stupid. They know they need to iterate with customers. But they're iterating towards a very specific event, the day when they turn it on for a billion people in 10 languages.

I'm saying that very wide launch makes it kind of sterile. And the drive towards scalability-first probably prevents them from exploring quirkier ideas.

This is exactly what they did with Wave and is one of the reasons why it failed; you always end up with some group of 8 people that can use the system and 2 people that can't making the entire product useless for collaboration.

True. I think the problem is that, when blinded by the "we're going to be huuuuuuuge" mindset, it's easy to forget that shit needs to work at the small scale first.

And that taking an extra six months to get it done, or doing it 5% less well, can be a big barrier to getting huge.

It's particularly silly to start off that way, because Google didn't. Google was held together by spit and duct tape in the early years, and gradually evolved into what it is today.

> Google was held together by spit and duct tape in the early years

Indeed. Here's a pic:

http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/pictures/display/...

Based on the quotes at the bottom of the page (as there isn't any sample chapters or anything of that nature), it'll be witty businessisms and quips, much akin to the manifesto style of "Re:work" by 37 Sig... I mean basecamp. It'll probably be low on concrete advise but instead focus on a mindset.

Yeah, it's a bit like trying to explain Valve's success in terms of its dysfunctional structure(subjective, I know). If you look at stuff like Google+ and numerous misteps with gmail/hangouts you would be forgiven for mistaking Google for any other large company with enough prior successes and resources to have reached a certain "critical mass". Not sure these companies hold the secrets to repeatable success.

HN opinion clearly isn't with you, but I think there's a lot of truth in your comment. I can think of a couple of reasons.

First because all successful businesses have something that is generating a lot cash for them which means they can spend money on resources small teams cannot, and they can keep trying. In the Google case they can just keep plugging away at social. This isn't a "critical mass" but it's significant.

Second because the "critical mass" is existing users and brand awareness. It's always easier to sell to an existing customer, they have experience with you and like how you operate. Just being able to easily reach the user-base that Google can is a massive leg-up. You also get the benefit of being able to add network-effect or tie things together - see the whole gmail+G+.As importantly, people trust brands (how else can you explain Starbucks!) so you're more likely to be able cross barriers to get users on-board. Users associate themselves and their values with certain brands, it makes it much easier to extend into new product categories.

Everyone likes a success story, but the way that large organisations operate and their models for innovation don't apply well to small teams (in my opinion).