'In the long-run we are all dead' John Maynard Keynes 'Keynes is dead; in either long or short run' Sumeet Kaul

Monday, August 29, 2005

What is wrong with Google


Fairy tales in b-school tell about an organization, so beautiful, so sweet, so perfect it could do no wrong. Its employees wander about in corridors embellished with psychedelic& hip paintings, greeting each other with mirthfulness and sincerity unheard of in a world full of organizational politics. Whose products delight customers in manner and degree sex fails to. Whose returns to shareholders are not matched by anyone in market. Google comes close to this description.

Last statement is probably an understatement for all I have seen of Google, it has exceeded this description in more than one ways. I personally think voice quality of Google talk is superior to that of intercom telephones in our rooms. 280$ stock price a year after its supposedly overpriced IPO at 85$. Those who know Google, do pray to get in ( I for example).

All this without an army of MBA's (Oooh that hurt a lot of egos in)

What is then wrong with Google ??

Most of its revenue are coming from ads on the search result page, not from the fancy products like Desktop Search, Google Earth etc. It has developed. It fails to realize it was a web company it is now a products company. It presently has a capability to sell its products, something it is not doing so far. Probably because it is too happy right now to understand that its products are not increasing its revenues in any way. It is wasting shareholder's money on a hobby. Shareholders are not complaining, but with a return close to 200 % a year who will.

Friday, August 26, 2005

Creativity an error

I remember a middle aged, middle class looking person asking me at one of the Qutab Institutional Area streets, what i thought of IIPM. I was not sure what to tell him, I acted MBAish and gave a non-committal, little-substance answer.

British poets of 19th century rarely wrote what they felt, they were conscious of being judged by the public and the fear of judgment meant that their poetry was not a work of art but science of intellectual vaccumness, which they disguised as wise insight. Our lives at b-school suffer from the same disease. We follow success hoping to recreate it by doing exactly like they way 'they' do/did it. Success is not a formula or equation but an event like any other, interlinked with many others not all of which are under our control. But at the assembly line of managers, creativity will keep on getting rejected as defect in the process. Just like the British poets.