When Steve returned to Apple after his 12-year hia­tus, he embraced sim­plic­ity with a vengeance. While Apple was won­der­ing in the wilder­ness, they some­how man­aged to amass no fewer than a dozen dif­fer­ent vari­a­tions of their var­i­ous com­put­ers. All were crappy (and I speak as a for­mer owner of sev­eral of them) but at least there were a lot of dif­fer­ent vari­eties of crap to choose from.

One of my favorite pas­sages from Walt Isaacson’s book describes how Jobs quickly pruned the unwieldy prod­uct port­fo­lio back down to size:

“After a few weeks Jobs finally had enough. “Stop!” he shouted at one big prod­uct strat­egy ses­sion. “This is crazy.” He grabbed a magic marker, padded to a white­board, and drew a hor­i­zon­tal and ver­ti­cal line to make a four-squared chart. “Here’s what we need,” he con­tin­ued. Atop the two columns he wrote “Con­sumer” and “Pro”; he labeled the two rows “Desk­top” and “Portable.” Their job, he said, was to make four great prod­ucts, one for each quadrant.”

The upshot is this. It’s not worth doing some­thing unless you know you can do it really well.  Which brings me to Google.

Google has always embraced the grass roots def­i­n­i­tion of inno­va­tion. The prin­ci­ple is this: get a bunch of really smart peo­ple, let them dream up really smart things, and then fig­ure out a way to mon­e­tize on it. Google car­ries it even fur­ther. They have recently been on a shop­ping spree for other com­pa­nies who are also dream­ing up smart things. In the­ory, it sounds great. There’s only one prob­lem. It lacks sim­plic­ity. And, by exten­sion, it lacks focus.

Now, if you refer back to a col­umn I wrote ear­lier (Ama­zon = Evo­lu­tion, Google = Intel­li­gent Design) it seems that I’m danc­ing on both sides of an argu­ment. I don’t see it that way. My point in that col­umn was that you can choose to pro­vide plat­forms that enable wide spread inno­va­tion, but it’s dif­fi­cult to try to own that process entirely within one orga­ni­za­tion. Plat­forms enable inno­va­tion to play out over a larger stage.

Now, you might say (and I would say the same, being a rabid Dar­win­ist) that nature also lacks sim­plic­ity. Evo­lu­tion cer­tainly didn’t hap­pen through any top down direc­tive to be num­ber one or num­ber two at any­thing. Evo­lu­tion is the biggest ongo­ing trial and error exper­i­ment ever con­ducted. Google’s approach seems to have much in com­mon with nature in this regard.

But in fact, nature imposes the ulti­mate sim­plic­ity at a later stage, and it does so with relent­less cru­elty: suc­cess­ful vari­a­tions sur­vive, and unsuc­cess­ful ones die. As mer­cu­r­ial as Jobs was, he doesn’t hold a can­dle to the whims of ol’ Ma Nature.

In today’s mar­ket­place, there seems to be a urge to try new things just because we can. The bar­rier to entry is lower than ever thanks to tech­nol­ogy. So we rush oppor­tu­nity on mul­ti­ple fronts, hop­ing one will pay off for us. Com­pa­nies like Google encour­age this by actively enabling their team to dab­ble in what­ever strikes their fancy. I’m not say­ing this is wrong, but at some point, focus has to be brought into the equa­tion. You need to sim­plify, pri­or­i­tize and focus to turn out “insanely great” prod­ucts. You need to not only be inno­v­a­tive; you also need to be a ruth­less pruner of less than great ideas. And the cul­ture that fos­ters col­lab­o­ra­tive inno­va­tion gen­er­ally has a dif­fi­cult time arbi­trat­ing what sur­vives and what doesn’t. This cre­ates con­fu­sion and mixed pri­or­i­ties. It saps away simplicity.

Google’s approach is to extend beta peri­ods indef­i­nitely, hop­ing that this will weed out the win­ners from the losers. Even­tu­ally, loser prod­ucts (and there have been many) die under their own iner­tia. But in the mean­time, this extended life sup­port sys­tem drains cor­po­rate resources. How many real win­ners have come out of Google Labs? What is the suc­cess rate of Google’s approach to inno­va­tion? What would have hap­pened if Google Search weren’t as wildly prof­itable as it’s been? Would Google still be around?

Orig­i­nally pub­lished in Mediapost’s Search Insider December 21, 2011


Biography / Resume : Gord Hotchkiss is the founder and senior vice president of Enquiro, now part of Mediative. He is renowned in the industry for his expertise when it comes to understanding online user and search behaviour. He and the Enquiro team have built a solid reputation for being the leading experts when it comes to understanding what happens on a search portal and why. Before Enquiro, Gord was chairman and director of SEMPO (The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization), he worked as a columnist for MediaPost and Search Engine Land, and he was a regular speaker at industry conferences and events. Gord is also the author of The BuyerSphere Project: How Business Buys from Business in a digital marketplace.