Google’s Master Plan: Erased!
Robert Scoble was at the Googleplex yesterday, and he says that someone has erased the famous Google Master Plan. Now, while the Master Plan is a big joke (employees use it to write down every ridiculous idea they have, like Google Diets, Google Ski Conditions, Google Casino, space travel, weather control, orbital mind control and crop circles), erasing it is a big deal, given the amount of work that went into it. My guess is it was a dramatic gesture related to Sergey Brin’s call last week for Google to work more on improving existing products than releasing new ones.
Co-founder Sergey Brin is leading a companywide initiative called “Features, not products.” He said the campaign started this summer when Google executives realized that myriad product releases were confusing their users.
“It’s worse than that,” said Brin, Google’s president of technology. “It’s that I was getting lost in the sheer volume of the products that we were releasing.”
http://www.flickr.com/photos/oddwick/235269197/
It has become way too crowded
Comment by Pierre | October 11, 2006
As much as I love Google, it was about time they refocused on what was already making them successful instead of trying to conquer the world in a month. Shame to see the master plan go, but now they can start a new one that actually means something.
Comment by Mike | October 11, 2006
How can yuo predict what works and what dosen’t? See James Burkes’ Connections I to understand how unpredictable what works and what dosen’t.
Comment by Joseph | October 11, 2006
Dang, you pegged it!
You see, despite the mass of engineers we had working on Google Diet(tm), Google TimeTravel(tm), and :cough: the Google DeathRay(tm), after the media quotes about our focus, all (okay, most of) those projects were scrapped.
So, given that that “joke” whiteboard actually IS reflecting our master plan, we had to update it to note our new priorities.
Comment by Adam Lasnik | October 11, 2006
YES! FEATURES!
Recently I was thinking Google was becoming too Apple/Gnome-ish, I’m glad they’re going to focus on improving their existing products again - by extending them. Assuming it’s a plan already.
Okay, okay, I’ll go RTFA.
Comment by Tim | October 12, 2006