Over the weekend, I read a provocative article, The Final Days of Google: It is going to be an inside job by Robert X. Cringely which I found via a Valleywag post. It is a very good article that I recommend reading if you have the time but the quick summary is that Cringely’s hypothesis is that the company that gives Google a run for its money will be started by the talent and ideas being incubated at Google today.
While I think any company runs the inherent risk that employees will leave to start their own profitable venture, that goes with the territory and also applies to almost any type of firm in any type of industry. But my sense is that Google employees, while incredibly intelligent and talented, pose no greater risk towards building a competitive innovation than anyone else. Check out the article’s comments which tend to agree with that premise. Here are a couple of reasons why, starting with the weakest argument:
History
Historical track record is a great predictor of future outcomes. If you look at the recent technology leaders and innovations that have taken place, they have not occurred from founders flight of established technology leaders. Google itself came out of the academic arena as did Yahoo! I’ll admit, I have not done the proper diligence on this point, just going off memory. Happy to be challenged or verified.
Copyright
Copyright is a strong deterrent to the scenario. Google implemented the 20% time program a key competitive advantage to develop future products and business. As such, they clearly have policies in place to protect that advantage. Any work product that is developed at Google is the property of Google. My sense is that would apply to both the engineers and the researchers completely their work with Google funds. So, it would really take an astute individual to hold an idea back and strike it out on their own, but it most certainly couldn’t be in the search space.
Power of Google Platform
We must not lose sight of the value of creating and developing new ideas on top of the Google platform. Many of the ideas fostered by the 20% program are built upon the framework of the Google search architecture. It is not going to be a seamless transition to simply take that new idea into a new self-standing company even if copyright (discussed above) was not a problem. It is going to take a strong disruption to unseat Google, especially if it is going to be in the area of search. Time will tell if it will be something we already know about like semantic search written about today at Read/WriteWeb.
Final Thoughts: Googlers will leave to start their own ventures. It would be naive to think that they wouldn’t. Google has a keen ability to find and foster both technological and entrepreneurial talent. That will not stop in the people they hire at Google, it stays with people forever. However, it doesn’t mean that the new ideas that former Googlers develop will come from the Google idea bank nor be in direction competition with Google’s business.
Related Reading:
- Googlers going to do themselves in? by Scoble
- Google Entrepreneurs by MacKayNet
- 20% Free Time – The Biggest Threat to Google by Digital Inspiration
- Google’s biggest fear: Googlers by MediaVidea
