Review on the book "How Google works"

I am fortunate to find another great book. This book is call "How Google Works" (https://www.howgoogleworks.net).

This book is written by Eric Schmidt (ex executive Chairman at Google & Alphabet) and Johnathon Rosenberg (ex SVP of Products at Google).

Since most of our friends have invested into Alphabet, this book written by insiders will bring valuable insights about the company.

This book tells us that Google is always thinking big, continuous innovating and doing their best to attract best talents.

After reading the book, I am more optimistic about their stock Alphabet. If you have not invested into Alphabet, you should seriously consider to add this stock into your well balanced portfolio.


Below are extracts from the book:

• The only way to succeed in business in the twenty-first century is to continually create great products, and the only way to do that is to attract smart creatives (staffs) and put them in an environment where they can succeed at scale.

• We have long felt that the start-up model, with small, autonomous teams located in one office led by passionate founders, is the most effective way to achieve remarkable new things.

• We have always had "20 percent projects", where Googlers are allowed and encouraged to work on projects of their own choosing.

• Perhaps the best known of Google's innovation principles is our mantra to think big, to make things ten times better and not just 10% better. This has led us to take on moonshot projects such as self-driving cars, smart contact lenses that monitor glucose levels in diabetics, affordable internet access for everyone via helium balloons, and airborne kites that generate wind energy at one-tenth cost of traditional windmills.

• For years, Google's primary tool for managing the company's resource was a spreadsheet with a ranked list of the company's top 100 projects, which was available for everyone to see and debated in semi-quarterly meetings. These meetings were part status update, part resource allocation and part brainstorming.

• Microsoft did aggresively challenge us, reportedly spending nearly $11 billion in an attempt to knock Google off its perch as a key player in the internet search and advertising business. Microsoft programs like MSN Search, Window Live, and Bing, failed to achieve true prominence, not because they are poorly executed but because Google was so well prepared for them. We made search faster and available in more languages and improved our user interface to make it easier to use. We added maps and better local results. And we monetized all of this with highly efficient and effective ad systems.

• Three powerful technology trends have converged to fundamentally shift the playing field in most industries. First the internet has made information free, copious, and ubiquitous - practically everything is online. Second, mobile devices and networks have made global reach and continuous connectivity widely available. And third, cloud computing has put practically infinite computing power and storage and a host of sophisticated tools and applications at everyone's disposal, on an inexpensive, pay as you go basis. Today, access to these technologies is still unavailable to much of the world's population, but it wont be long before that situation changes and the next 5 billion people come online.
- From a consumer perspective, the convergence of these 3 technological waves has made the impossible possible.
- Such as: Travelling to a foreign country, talk into your phone and see or hear your words translated into practically any language.
- Such as: Want to know if that resturant you picked for tonight's date has the right ambience or easy parking? Virtually drive there, walk through the front door, and take a tour inside. Table 14 looks perfect.

• Google's Adsense product, which developed into a multibillion dollar business, was invested one day by a group of engineers from different teams who were playing pool in the office. Your partner is probably great, but the odds of two of you coming out with a billion dollar business during a coffee break is pretty small.

• Hippos (Highest Paid Person's Opinion) are dangerous in companies. When it comes to the quality of decision-making, pay level is intrinsically irrelevant. It is the quality of the idea that matters, not who suggests it.

• In 2005, when we bought Andriod, there was some debate among our management team about whether or not we should keep it open. Sergey suggested to keep it open. Andriod stayed open, grew extraordinarily, and helped Google smoothly navigate the platform shift from PC to mobile by giving us a platform that was highly complementary to search.

• Dont follow competition. If you focus on your competition, you will never deliver anything truly innovative. While you and your competitors are busy fighting over fractions of a market share point, someone else who dont care will come in and build a new platform that completely changes the game. Larry said our job is to think of the thing you havent thought of yet that you really need.

• Product people have such a great impact. Pay attention to hiring them and when your process guarantees excellence at the product core of the company, it will spill over to every other team as well.

• In our experience, a lot of job candidates have figured out that passion is a sought after trait. Passionate people dont wear their passion on their sleeves, they have it in their hearts. If someone is truly passionate about something, they will do it for a long time even if they aren't at first successful. Failure is often part of the deal. The passionate person will often talk at length about his pursuits. These people can spend an entire career and still find challenging and engaging every day.

• Hire learning animal. Henry Ford said "Anyone who stops learning is old. Anyone who keeps learning stays young." Our ideal candidates are the ones who prefer roller coasters, the ones who keep learning. These learning animals have the smarts to handle massive change and the character to love it. If you have a growth mindset, you will set learning goals - goals that will drive you to take risks without worrying asking a dumb question. You wont care because you are a learning animal, and in the long run you will learn more and scale greater heights.

• When Google launched Google Earth, it was an immediate hit with users and also generated millions of dollars. How could that be when it is free? People who download Google Earth are interested in getting toolbar as well. Toolbar can initiate search without going to google.com. This increased toolbar's user base significantly and generated lots of revenue.

• Think big. One of Eric and Larry's challenges to engineers and product managers was always "you aren't thinking big enough". In the internet century, with infinite information, reach, and computing power, global scale is available to just about everyone. But too many people stuck in the old, limited mindset. Larry Page's directive "think 10X" helps to fix that.
- Astro Teller, head of Google X notes that if you want to create a car that gets 10% better mileage, you just have to tweak the current design. But if you want to get one that gets 5 hundred miles per gallon, you need to start over. Just the thought process - How would I start over? - can spur ideas that were previously not considered.