> Good science is repeatable. Given that Google is arguably an intellectually friendly environment, where more people than average understand how to talk in ways that get closer to truth, the inadvertent experiment conducted by Google over the past 15 years or so should hold a lot of weight.
But what conclusion should be drawn from this experiment?
During those years, Google grew into a large and profitable company, with enormous impact on the world and technical community. One could argue that the lack of a traditional corporate culture was important for attracting the employees who made this possible.
Perhaps Google eventually grew to the point where this was no longer a positive factor -- but even knowing that, should they have done things differently in the early days?
You could look at message boards in the public space, Yammer, etc and draw the same conclusions. Online communities always have a critical mass where increasingly strong moderation is required.
Organizational structure is a massive influence on any organization's outputs, and seems over and over to be substantially more important than the personal attributes or credentials of the pool of employees. This is discussed by Clay Christensen in the context of disruption tech theory, it's enshrined in hacker lore as Conway's Law, and I'm sure is well known across many other domains.
One could interpret the overall trajectory of Google here as reaching the limits of disruption-capable organizational design. It's likely they hit that limit some years back, and have just reached the point where they've internalized it enough to drop the pretense.
It's not all bad -- there are many things at which large corporate structures excel. They're just not typically the ones that are sought in Silicon Valley.
I am not sure if google could have done that but there is always the realization to be made that small is beautiful. At some point growth turns into taking on more useless people and then you need more money to fund all of them and then you need to turn to unethical practices. Perhaps the google founders could at some point have decided to buy back as much of their stock as possible and after that they no longer would have needed to make as much money as possible and could have just kept having the greatest search engine with a little advertising on the side.
Yep, feels like there's a bias in here. The "big experiment" that is on our radar (which is supposedly proving that free culture is a liability after all) is only big and on our radar to discuss because it reached such success compared to other companies (and it grew under those same conditions we're maybe implying are being proved wrongheaded?)
But what conclusion should be drawn from this experiment?
During those years, Google grew into a large and profitable company, with enormous impact on the world and technical community. One could argue that the lack of a traditional corporate culture was important for attracting the employees who made this possible.
Perhaps Google eventually grew to the point where this was no longer a positive factor -- but even knowing that, should they have done things differently in the early days?