We’ve all heard this nonsense before from multi-billion dollar companies. They are suddenly going to act like start-ups.
Why do companies do this? Why would they want to act like a start-up? Is it romantic? Sentimental? It is downright foolish.
What company wants to act like a start-up unless they are a start-up?
So how would Google actually go about acting like a start up.? First, make a lot of dumb decisions and work 16 hours a day trying to correct them. That would be one way.
Here’s another: Google needs to also close all the free restaurants they have on campus. Close them. Start-ups don’t have that sort of free food. Maybe some bananas and juices. Employees can bring their own food and store it in a cheap refrigerator. Now you are talking start up.
Note to Larry: Get rid of the jets you guys now own. What start-up in history has a jet fleet? To act like a start-up you are going to have to dump the jets.
Let’s face it. This whole act like a start-up business is insincere rubbish. You cannot act like a start up any way because you are a mature company.
When some chief executive says that he wants his company to act like a start-up, what he is really saying is that he thinks that his employees are lazy and they should work more hours. That’s probably the only part of the start-up ethos he is interested in, or he’d sell the jets and close food services. If you think a division is not pulling its weight, say so. Find the managers and fire them, or at the very least, lecture them.
There is not one person I have seen go to work for Google who has not put on a lot of pounds from all the free food.
And insofar as free food is concerned, we're not talking about a few snack rooms or a normal cafeteria where you’d pay some modest fee for a salad and sandwich. We're talking about multiple massive food courts producing some of the finest corporate food one has ever seen — all you can eat every day, for free.
And there are weird amenities. For example all the syrups in all the soda pop stations — brand names — have been specially formulated for Google so there is no high-fructose corn syrup in any of the sodas.
These are food palaces serving every sort of cuisine. All that is missing are carafes of Bordeaux wine served by slave girls.
So let’s get this act like a start-up idea off the table and do what needs to be done at Google. What needs to be done is for the company to get people enthused about the outstanding ancillary products. And by this, we do not mean the Google+ Facebook competitor.
We're referring to its navigation system, for starters. The Google turn-by-turn navigation system combined with its street-level photos has no peer. If this was sold as a stand-alone product to compete with Tom-Tom, Garmin and Magellan it would probably ruin those companies overnight.
Why someone doesn’t take this software and put it on a 7-inch tablet? It should be sold as a navigation system, because Google is promoting it poorly.
And the thing can navigate a walking tour, a bicycle route and easily re-adjust for detours. If you want to take a scenic route, the device is not constantly telling you to take a U-turn. It assumes you, the driver, know what you are doing. Drive five miles off course? No problem.
Google has a lot of initiatives that would be great little stand-alone operations. If Larry Page wants to think start-up, then perhaps he should spin some of these operations off and into their own facilities. Then these divisions would be acting like real start-ups.
But then again, there goes the free food.
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