Productivity or Innovation

"If I had asked the public what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse."

Henry Ford (1863 – 1947), Founder of Ford Motor Company

The evening of July 27th, 2022, it should have been cloudy, over Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA. The CEO of Google (Alphabet), during the regular all-hands meeting of the internet giant, in a tone somewhat urgent, warned that:

...productivity as a company isn’t where it needs to be...

Productivity? Very Interesting!

I guess Sundar Pichai and the Google top management, have their own definition, metrics, and standards for measuring productivity. That "Google productivity" should be expressed as a ratio of an aggregate output to an aggregate input (e.g. labor cost) used in the production process.

And here comes the importance of Innovation:

• When you create highly innovative products, outperforming the competition, your productivity numerator (the output), increases exponentially.

• When you develop innovative internal tools, your productivity denominator (the input) decreases dramatically!

There is plenty of "room" for innovation in all the business and technological areas that Google is actively involved. Innovations that create a big leap and add value:

• File System, based on content semantics and not into the old-fashioned directory listing. So you can search your family summer pictures by a simple query and not by browsing the ocean of Terra-bytes!

• Revolutionized Operating Systems.

• Intuitive Human to Machine interaction processes, creating a novel experience.

• New Virtual Reality experiences, transforming most of our physical experiences and interactions.

• Innovative Programming Languages with no procedural and semantic restrictions but rather focusing on the problem solution and the intuitive manner of expressing it to the Computer!

This is how Google became the "de-facto" owner of the internet: by on boarding top talented engineers, using unique internal tools, and delivering mind-blowing innovative products.

Innovation at all stages.

And then Productivity "arrived". As the byproduct of Innovation.

Productivity is a result, not the cause or the vision!

And definitely not a motivation, especially for talented engineers, that I have the privilege to know at Google!

Always live your day with a smile.

The Cyclyst