For Jobs-era Apple, your incentive is to make something Jobs liked and the only reason that worked was because Jobs had great taste (subjective ofc) and a strong vision of what he wanted.
Amazon is very very focused on outcomes and that's what incentives a lot of decisions. Being data-driven is a tool to understand and measure the outcomes and inform decisions.
Google from the outside may be data-driven but data-driven to do what?
Jobs wanted to make a great phone, amazon wants to be your everything store, Google wanted to organize the world's information but the company has far exceeded that original goal and it's not clear what they want to do now.
That's what we keep seeing products that seem to exist for their own sake in many companies imo and those products struggle to find footing and die with no learnings.
Interesting point, particularly in light of their history of starting up products only to kill them off 2-5 years later. One could say they are data-driven to sell ads, but that's almost overly broad and makes it hard to explain niches like self-driving cars.
It seems to me that when it comes to growing and scaling their successful products, Google is data-driven. However when bringing new products to market Google basically has been driven by what leadership thinks is interesting/important, instead of analyzing what the market wants.
Sometimes they hit a big opportunity like Gmail and it grows like crazy, but a lot of the time there's actually no market for their product, or the technology is nowhere near ready to work at scale. This leads to a lot of canceled projects.
For Jobs-era Apple, your incentive is to make something Jobs liked and the only reason that worked was because Jobs had great taste (subjective ofc) and a strong vision of what he wanted.
Amazon is very very focused on outcomes and that's what incentives a lot of decisions. Being data-driven is a tool to understand and measure the outcomes and inform decisions.
Google from the outside may be data-driven but data-driven to do what?
Jobs wanted to make a great phone, amazon wants to be your everything store, Google wanted to organize the world's information but the company has far exceeded that original goal and it's not clear what they want to do now.
That's what we keep seeing products that seem to exist for their own sake in many companies imo and those products struggle to find footing and die with no learnings.