What Did Google Do Right?

When I was in Russia recently, I didn’t have much to do over there. I spent some time in Korkino, a very small village in central Russia. For a guy who is used to a lot of activity and the hi-tech life (I guess I can call it that), I found myself more than a little bored sometimes. One of the several books I read there was “The Google Story”, by David A. Vise. Its a great book for those interested in the formation of Google. It takes you from the initial days of Google (starting as the college project of a couple of guys), to the formation of the company, the eventual IPO, and to the present. As a guy running my own business online, it is interesting to see what went in to creating a company with the size, success and repute of Google.

Obviously, all of the decisions made in the history of Google is enough to fill, well, a book. However, one of the key things stood out to me and it was a founding state of mind put forth by the two founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. What did they do right? They kept their eye keen on their valuable final product and on what the entire business was all about - search. No matter what came up, it was all looked at through the lens of whether it would make the search engine better or not.

The two founders have grandiose dreams for Google. They want it to be THE gateway to all information for the world, pretty much. The two men are very liberal minded, very idealistic, and they took great care in forming Google around their philosophy and staying true to their ideals. In order to realize their dream of having all information searchable for anyone (including the human genome), they had to keep their eye on search and ensure all moves done by Google would help make it a better search engine.

What is the lesson here for those of us not running a search engine, much less a business the size of Google? The lesson here is to state up front what the valuable final product is of your business, then to orient everything you do in the business toward the achievement of that product. If people start to try to convince you to start something new, judge it by whether or not it will help make the final product better or easier to achieve.

Compare Google to some of the other search engines of the dot-bomb era. Many of the old search engines tried to evolve into huge internet portals, trying to be everything to everyone. Before too long, sites such as AltaVista were trying to do everything. Yahoo, today, is trying to do everything for everybody and they seem to be doing well at it, but look at the long list of failures. These search engines forgot that what they needed to do was be a better search engine. They took their eye off the ball, and they failed.

When Google was facing a coming IPO, Brin and Page were concerned about losing control of Google and not being able to keep Google on the path that they wanted. Once a company goes public, its easy to lose control. And of course the board of directors gets very interested in the bottom line and the mighty dollar. Chasing the money is one sure way to take your eyes of your company’s product. Money is not your final product. It is what you get in exchange for a superior product people want.

Concentrate on your product and on making it better. Google did.

You Might Also Like:

1. Has Google Penalized Your Site?
2. Google Updates Their Adsense Policies
3. Google Pay-Per-Action Launches
4. Does Facebook Represent a Google Killer?
5. Lazy Linkage - Google Buys Feedburner

If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.