Dare Obasanjo has an interesting observation about Google's culture:

This expectation that a new Google product will need massive adoption to justify its investment or be cancelled within four months, as was the case with Google Lively, will be a significant dampener new product launches. Reading Paul Buchheit's post on the early days of Gmail I wonder how much time he'd have invested in the project if he was told that Google would cancel the project if it's user base growth wasn't competitive with market leaders like Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail's within four months.

This isn't a huge surprise, but Dare is one of the few people paying attention to the transition: Google has gone from "small and innovative" to "big and conservative" much more quickly than a lot of companies. It took Microsoft a lot longer to get there, but then again, their initial growth was slower.

The more interesting question is this: between the economic slowdown and things like Sarbanes/Oxley, the IPO market is just dead. Where's the challenge to Google going to come from?

Technorati Tags: innovation, corporate culture