Nest’s time at Alphabet
This sums up Google in a single paragraph:In 2015 Nest posted job listings for its "Nest Audio Team." The team would be responsible for "developing an audio roadmap for Nest products." Industry observers suspected the audio team was building a smart Bluetooth speaker, but Google beat Nest to the punch with Google Home, an Amazon Echo-style Bluetooth speaker and voice assistant appliance. According to a report from The Information, when Nest found out about Google Home, it asked to work on the project with Google. Nest's request was turned down. We can only guess why—maybe Nest's reputation inside Google had something to do with it?Often times Google has multiple projects doing effectively the same "thing" going at the same time. They don't work together because the idea is to have the team that can get to the "finish line" first to win, not to co-operate. This, as it was explained to me by an engineering director there, was to encourage a 'natural selection mechanism that selected for the best teams and the best products.'While I understood the idea, that you would pit your own resources against each other like that was kind of foreign to me. My own personal learning from that, having watched them for 15 years, four of which from the inside, is that as a way of managing a company it produces few viable products and no viable businesses.