Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline
Big companies seem to step in the same puddle, every time they try to set up one of these &quot;breakthrough incubator&quot; projects. They pick fascinating projects. They hire lots of smart people and give them great autonomy. But they inadvertently set up incentives that lead to the repeated creation of LINS (lavishly impractical non-solutions). And then the plug gets pulled.<p>I think the key problem is that the research team starts optimizing for periodic demo days with the boss. That&#x27;s a sheltered environment in which clever (and easy to demonstrate) technical features are rewarded, and real-world annoyances involving customers, social norms, regulators, pricing, etc. are put off for &quot;later.&quot; Not only are ecosystem problems not addressed, they aren&#x27;t even vigorously considered.<p>The technology behind Google Glass was quite clever and some variant of that idea may eventually work. But what arrived on the market was LINS to an extreme. You can find similar failures in Detroit&#x27;s concept cars, Paul Allen&#x27;s first go at Vulcan, Xerox Parc&#x27;s grossly overpriced STAR, etc.<p>I&#x27;m not sure how to fix this. Within the big-company budgeting system, it takes a daring CEO to allow super-innovative projects to break the usual rules about desired five-year ROIs. Once such a CEO takes a stand, it&#x27;s really hard for him&#x2F;her to get out of the way.<p>Suppose these CEOs do miraculously set up a system that  approximates the scrappy, minimum-viable experiments of a true startup, with the marketplace being the true boss. That still is problematic. When a big company is pushing MVPs into the marketplace, the public scrutiny and scorn makes it really hard to recover from an awkward start -- and keep iterating in peace.