What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [49]
Life is a beta
Almost every new service Google issues is a beta—a test, an experiment, a work in progress, a half-baked product. It is a Silicon Valley punch line that Google products stay in beta forever—Google News was supposedly unfinished and in testing for more than three years—whereas Microsoft releases products and releases them again and releases them a third time before finally getting them (almost) right.
“Beta” is Google’s way of never having to say they’re sorry. It is also Google’s way of saying, “There are sure to be mistakes here and so please help us find and fix them and improve the product. Tell us what you want it to be. Thanks.” Most established companies would consider releasing unfinished products to market criminal: You can’t produce a product that’s not perfect—and not even done—or it will hurt the brand, right? Not if you make mistakes well. “Innovation, not instant perfect perfection,” was Google vice president Marissa Mayer’s advice to Stanford students. “The key is iteration. When you launch something, can you learn enough about the mistakes that you make and learn enough from your users that you ultimately iterate really quickly?” The internet makes iteration and development-on-the-fly possible.
Mayer put Google’s worldview into cultural context: “I call this my Macs and Madonna theory. When you look at Apple and Madonna, they were cool in 1983, they’re still cool today in 2006, 23 years later.” How do they manage that? “They don’t do it by being perfect every time. There’s lots of missteps along the way. Apple had the Newton, Madonna has the sex book.” When you make a mistake, Mayer advises, “you just iterate your way out of it or you reinvent yourself.”
Mayer recounted a debate among engineers before the launch of Google News. Days before the start of the beta, they had enough time to implement one more feature—sort by date or by location—but couldn’t decide. So they did neither. The day the service was released, they got 305 emails and 300 of them asked for sort by date. The users answered the engineers’ question for them. “Just get the product out there and then have the users tell us where it is more important to spend our time.” Google is not perfect. “We make mistakes every time, every day,” Mayer confessed. “But if you launch things and iterate really quickly, people forget about those mistakes and have a lot of respect for how quickly you build the product up and make it better.”
Google is unafraid of making mistakes that can cost money—courage one rarely sees in business. Advertising executive Sheryl Sandberg (who later was hired away from Google to be COO of Facebook) made an error she won’t describe in detail that cost the company millions of dollars. “Bad decision, moved too quickly, no controls in place, wasted some money,” she confessed to Fortune magazine. She apologized to boss Larry Page, who responded: “I’m so glad you made this mistake, because I want to run a company where we are moving too quickly and doing too much, not being too cautious and doing too little. If we don’t have any of these mistakes, we’re just not taking enough risk.” Google CEO Eric Schmidt told The Economist that he urges employees: “Please fail very quickly—so that you can try again.”
Facebook tends to blunder into new products, making mistakes as it goes. When Facebook introduced the news feed that compiles tidbits from friends’ pages and activities, some users were freaked by what they perceived as a loss of privacy (even though anything going into news feeds was already public). Protest groups were formed inside the service, using Facebook to organize a fight against Facebook. Founder Mark Zuckerberg apologized