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Comment by joebadmo | Hacker News Reader

It's awesome to see a fundamentally engineer-driven company like Google and a fundamentally designer-driven company like Apple become so successful. It has always seemed to me that management is an important but overemphasized skill (as a fundamental trait of the way large organizations work) and it's really refreshing to see this happening.

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"It's awesome to see a fundamentally engineer-driven company like Google and a fundamentally designer-driven company like Apple become so successful."

Out of curiosity, what do you think Amazon is driven by, fundamentally? I'd put them right up there with Apple on the product innovation front.

Data.

Customers.

[Edit: I worked at Amazon Web Services until recently. Now work at Google. Concern for customers drives everything that happens at Amazon, sometimes to a ridiculous degree.]

I'm interested to hear how that professed dedication to customers squares with the experiences of sites like reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/g66f0/why_reddit_was_d...

This was addressed well by someone from Netflix but I can't find the link. Basically he said that Reddit weren't so much the victim of AWS rather than the victim of not understanding the product enough and not spending enough to buy the right instances and thus ensure their constant performance. The guy from Netflix justified this by the way that the different sized instances are split across their respective hosts and, surprise surprise, if you buy the bigger instances you get more of each machine host and less threat of someone taking you out.

If that were true, you'd think that would be the first thing they were told when they started complaining about crashes a year ago. Certainly, you'd think by the time they had talked to the CIO, somebody would have said, "you guys need to buy bigger instances". We know money isn't a problem for reddit anymore, and all current and former employees have said the problems with EBS just aren't something they can fix by throwing money at.

I would suggest the guy from netflix simply doesn't know enough about reddit's particulars to offer an informed opinion. Either that, or he knows better than everyone at reddit, every support person at amazon, and even the CIO of amazzon how best to solve reddit's problems.

I strongly suspect the former.

> I'd put them right up there with Apple on the product innovation front.

Could you elaborate on that? I can think about only two potentially innovative products coming from Amazon.

1. Kindle. The business model is definitely innovative, but the device itself had a cold reception. The modern versions are much better, but still don't reach the Apple level of polish.

2. AWS. Extremely innovative, but targeted to a relatively small population. This is definitely not a mainstream product.

I intentionally skip the innovations in streamlining the shopping experience, because I don't feel it's relevant to the comparison to Apple.

Amazon's main strength is building platforms for other businesses , and innovating business models. their product innovations are just tools to build platforms. You can see this from a list of their innovations: 1. amazon fulfillment services. 2. the affiliate marketing method. 3. 3rd party sellers arena, used book selling arena inside their own store. 4. the kindle - a digital platform for many authors and publishers. the physical kindle is not that hard, just look on how many e-readers are there. 5. aws - a good product, but also an innovative business model.

In the tech industry this isn't really an issue (management being overemphasized). Even at places like IBM and Intel you generally have engineers running the show at every level of the engineering org.

I think what Google will see is that the real problem is the board and shareholder accountability. This creates a special type of short-term malfunction in organizations which often looks like a management problem, but really isn't.

Hell, Exxon is run by an engineer.

People on HN have this weird distinction where if your an engineer you stay an engineer. In the real world, most career structures involve coming in a engineer and then progressing into management. A lot the skills used for management such as negation skills just come with age anyway.

A lot the skills used for management such as negation skills just come with age anyway.

Well you get older and fear change a bit more, and you tend to say "no" to more things, but that's not really a management skill.

I respectfully disagree. I believe that knowing when and how to say "no" is one of the most important management skills, and I suspect that understanding the need to say "no" a lot more than "yes" in the early days of a project (or a whole business) is quite strongly correlated with success.

I think he meant to type "negotiation" rather than "negation", which makes little sense even if he was trying to convey the point you just made. So I was making a little fun of that. I agree with you.

Sorry, I missed the original (presumed) typo. My sense of humour has now been rebooted. :-)

> In the tech industry this isn't really an issue (management being overemphasized).

The thing is, in a lot of larger tech companies, I suspect it's the other way around: management is under-rated because the engineers have taken over the asylum.

It's easy to point to huge, successful companies with a very pro-engineering culture like Facebook and connect the culture with the success, but how do we know they succeeded because of the culture and not in spite of it? Certainly Google has produced a string of flops in recent years that would have killed most companies without the core search engine and arguably now mail and Android groups to prop them up. Facebook succeeds because they got a couple of basic things right in the early days and the networking effect is a massive barrier to entry for any potential competitor, not because all their engineers keep coming up with great ideas that lure people away from the competition.

I wonder how robust these companies really are, and how much their management structure (or relative lack thereof) will influence that robustness if in future they meet heavyweight competition or, more likely, disruptive competition that moves the market.

Management is great at extracting maximum value from a problem whose structure is known. For new problem spaces where the product is ill defined, management might just slow things down. It might be worth noting that as the world is moving into more uncharted territory (of shorter product cycles) industry is beginning to resemble academia to a greater extent.

You point to recent Google failures, but isn't their culture of allowing (even high profile) failures not only to get implemented, but then to get shut down part of why Google's successful? Which (the culture of allowing failure) seems like an engineering approach, and not a managerial (which to me has always struck me as fear-of-failure/CYA) one.

The question is whether those flops should have ever happened. I admire Google that they will kill unsuccessful products, but I question how well they understand the market when they have so many products to kill.

Seriously? What company doesn't have major failures? Not ones doing anything interesting.

Should we have never had the Space Shuttle program because a couple of them crashed?

Lots of failures is "working as intended". The only way to understand the market is to try out lots of things and see how the market reacts. Remember, the point of innovation is to solve unmet consumer needs - if people understood them, they wouldn't be unmet.

I think that is one way, but not the only way. Apple is able to release products that are generally well received by the market. In fact Apple understands the market for their individual products extremely well, even if the product isn't released yet. Google's approach seems to be more of a shotgun/spaghetti see if something sticks, without actually stopping to think things through first.

Isn't Apple targeting more of a niche than the general market, though? They service that niche very well, but it's easier to understand a niche than it is to understand the entire body of consumers.

The spaghetti cannon strategy. Microsoft do this too.

Apple does not follow the spaghetti cannon strategy. However the risks of manufacturing a device that doesn't sell is higher than launching a website that nobody uses. It makes sense for Apple to take their time. As a side-effect they've accumulated a huge stockpile of cash.

I still think it's worthwhile to distinguish between failure of execution and failure due to factors beyond your control. Buzz and Wave certainly had market challenges but they were seriously hampered by some poor decisions.

most companies fail, even the ones run by those who "understand the market" (if that phrase has any meaning outside of speaking completely in hindsight).

That's exactly his point. Both Facebook and Google have secured market domination to a level where their culture, be it engineering or managerial, doesn't really matter.

It's easy to point out Google's mistakes and point to their engineering culture, but look at Microsoft as a counterexample. Microsoft has more or less the same story as Google; one or two wildly successful products supplementing the rest of the business. The other groups at Microsoft leap into new markets to try and expand the core business (Xbox 360 being a fine example). I doubt we would call Microsoft's culture an engineering culture in the same vein as Google.

> Microsoft has more or less the same story as Google; one or two wildly successful products supplementing the rest of the business.

Really? I think if you list Microsoft's product lines, only a relatively small proportion failed badly. Sure, Zune never took off and their various on-line efforts haven't exactly had stellar results. Still, it's not like MS only makes money on Windows and Office. They also have a very successful range of server products aimed at businesses. Their initially loss-leading efforts to penetrate the computer game market are now doing pretty well. They even make good keyboards and mice.

Now, here's the kicker. Microsoft do effectively give away a couple of things, notably software development tools and IE. They also run Microsoft Research, which is where a respectable amount of serious work on the future of both programming and HCI is going on today. However, these things are done in a way that supports their overall business interests, which is exactly the sort of strategic decision that good management needs to be getting right.

I'm hardly a Microsoft fanboy, as many of my previous posts will confirm, but I don't think they have been anything like Google or Facebook in terms of hit-to-flop ratio in recent years.

Apple focuses on design/usability but its not designer driven. It is more of "product" driven sort.

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