"It may sound nuts, but I’ve found that it’s easier to make progress on mega-ambitious goals than on less risky projects. Few people are crazy enough to try, and the best people always want to work on the biggest challenges. We've also found that “failed” ambitious projects often yield other dividends."

Loved this comment! Out of curiosity, are there any other failures at Google (apart from the ones he mentioned) that are used for different purpose than the one intended?

Code Search is no longer public, but we use it internally. It's great for developer productivity to be able to search millions of lines of code in a second. (On my first day, I did a search for jrockway and found code I wrote at a company that Google bought. Yay!)

I am purely speculating (I work at Google but in a totally unrelated area), but from a user's perspective, many of the most awesome collaboration features in Docs seem to be inspired by the things that were most compelling (to me) about Wave.

"In addition, we gave many of our products, such as Google Search, a visual refresh, and they now have a cleaner, more consistent, and beautiful look. "

This is just bizarre.

As pg said in his essay "Ambitious Startups"

"Google used to give me a page of the right answers, fast, with no clutter. Now the results seem inspired by the Scientologist principle that what's true is what's true for you. And the pages don't have the clean, sparse feel they used to. Google search results used to look like the output of a Unix utility. Now if I accidentally put the cursor in the wrong place, anything might happen."

I agree. "Clean" in terms of design seems to have become a word that's tossed about without too much meaning attached to it.

Whatever claims other you make (faster return times, less time spent on search results what not), there is no way it can be described as "cleaner". They have got more cluttered, but it is up for discussion if this clutter is good or bad. For some, like PG, it's a bad thing. I personally like +1s and social results.

Why? That's exactly what they did.

What I find interesting is that there's no mention of "organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful".

I understand your point, but it is pretty clear that the topic comes up multiple times in the letter, most obviously in

> There is a huge amount of data in the world that isn’t publicly available today. Showing it in our results involves deep partnerships across different industries in many countries. It’s very similar to the work we did to get Google Maps off the ground.

What about quality?

Elaborate

This was definitely a letter for the Pinks. I found it hard to take seriously.

Just the length and number of headings put me off.

I find this interesting because Google is still famous for having famous hiring practices and is considered by the general public to have THE top tech talent in the largest amounts (although that may no longer be true).

Seems employees and hiring would be important...

The entire thing is ostensibly "about" the employees. I think you, like so many HNers, are trying a little to hard to spin everything Google-related into a negative.