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