Comments on: Can Google engineer chaos?

By: Brian

Brian — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 21:56:25 +0000

A stock market or any kind of internal means to let the citizens determine what happens inside the company would be very cool indeed. Google PM? They seem to have enough brainpower to put something like that in motion, and enough computing resources to make it go giddyap.

By: Mathew Ingram

Mathew Ingram — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 14:57:44 +0000

That’s an interesting comparison, Brian — to the free market I mean. I like that idea. I wonder if Google has some kind of internal stock-market on which different ideas are listed and then people get to vote (or bid) on which ones they like. Now that would be cool :-)

By: Brian

Brian — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 13:11:08 +0000

Half-baked thought - Google is embracing the free-market.

No, internally. It’s remarked that many organizatinos participate in the free market but internally the resemble command-driven economies.

Five-year plans, top-down resource allocation you know what I mean.

It didn’t work for Russia, and it frequently doesn’t work if your company needs to be agile in the market. As you noted Microsoft missed the internet. The only problem is it’s the only system we know.

So maybe Google has found a way to let the folks on the inside unlcok themselves from the internal command-style economy.

If so (and I could be all wrong) I’d bet on Google over the competition.