The end of Google Labs

Today Google announced they’re closing Google Labs, their collection of living prototypes and experiments. It will be overstated in the press how much this means or doesn’t mean. It’s common for successful companies to close R&D groups (or more accurately in this case, portals for discovering R&D work), or start them, depending on the winds of politics in the company at the time. The effect of  killing or starting these groups is always hard to measure inside, much less outside a company.

I wrote about the futility of having a VP of Innovation and sometimes I feel the same way about research groups. Some groups earn their keep, but few do. It’s hard to invent whether you’re on the front lines or in ivory towers, and all things equal, I’ll put my money on the people on the front line. As I understand Google Labs from their FAQ, it was a place for the world to discover the pet projects employees were working on for their 20% time. How the world will discover these things in the future is something of an unknown.

But what is telling from the short announcement posted today, is how mature Google has become.  We have on our hands a very straightforward, positively spun, corporate press release, that reads much like what Microsoft or Procter & Gamble might say:

Last week we explained that we’re prioritizing our product efforts. As part of that process, we’ve decided to wind down Google Labs. While we’ve learned a huge amount by launching very early prototypes in Labs, we believe that greater focus is crucial if we’re to make the most of the extraordinary opportunities ahead.. We’ll continue to push speed and innovation—the driving forces behind Google Labs—across all our products, as the early launch of the Google+ field trial last month showed.

When you see phrases like ‘extraordinary opportunities’, ‘prioritizing’, ‘process’ and ‘huge amounts of learning’, in reference to something being killed, you know you’re in the fantasy land of press releases. Winding down sounds oh so graceful, like winding down a party. And mentioning Google+, their current darling, is a well-played card.

And the kicker of course is the by-line:

Posted by Bill Coughran, SVP for Research and Systems Infrastructure

When a company has two levels of VPs (SVP = Senior Vice President) you know the days of free willing autonomy and entrepreneurial inspiration have faded. I remember the day at Microsoft when I learned there were over 100 VPs in the company – My mind was blown – I realized all at once how  it was no longer the company that hired me. It had more than tripled in size, and quadrupled in bureaucracy. David, as much as Microsoft was ever a David (see OS/2) , had now become a Goliath.

Success breeds unavoidable changes. Better leaders minimize the downsides, but only so much is possible.

The question is whether the people working at the old company are the right ones to keep working at the new company formed by success of the old. And when the path for how ideas get out the door changes, for better or worse, all the wise creatives ask “where is it exactly that I’m working?” When that path gets too long, it’s time to go. Google, despite its size and success, still has a better path for ideas than most corporations in the world, but for anyone who has been there too long, that might not be good enough.

7 Responses to “The end of Google Labs”

  1. Gary Smith

    Good points Scott! Having been inside a start-up group that got large (and filled with bureaucracy) I know exacly how some of the creatives there are going to feel. The trick will be to keep them engaged on whatever the new drivers have decided is the new focus. Otherwise as you imply, they’ll likely move on (and perhaps hatch the next “new” thing).

    Reply
  2. Manish Chhabra

    Google Labs has been one of my favorite parts of Google for years. For me at least, this deprecation pushes Google one notch closer to “boring megacorp” and one notch further away from the sort of cool “research garden” that Google is famous for being. I’m not saying Labs was the forefront of Google research, just that it was a fun, lighthearted place where nifty (and often quite strange) ideas could be trotted out.

    Reply
  3. @euonymous

    Ouch. As a veteran of high tech companies, I agree with you… the signs are not auspicious for Google with this sort of announcement, both regarding innovation and corporate structure. But then, as I tweeted a while back, Google makes $3B a month from ads. Top 20 words = 70% of income. http://linkd.in/qCVvgz With a business model like that, they don’t have a high incentive to explore new opportunities. Google has so many great tools and apps; they don’t seem to be monitizing them. Oh, well… possibly the beginning of the end (when technology people cease to be insanely committed to their companies and new products).

    Reply
  4. Sean Crawford

    Maybe some day we’ll look back and see that removing the fun lab and 20 % thing was like the Christmas carols amongst all the secular Christmas music: a small part of the whole, but needed as a catalyst, a soul, to engage the rest.

    Reply
  5. Erlend Walle

    Great article.

    I really don’t think this is the end for innovation at Google. However, the lab has not been rushing out with successful products, which I believe is mostly because of their beta policy.

    Look at Google Wave, which I personally thought would be the new big thing for communication on the internet. But, with a “request invite and get one two weeks later” policy when it’s allover the news, is a strategy, I can’t neither understand nor recommend. I believe policies like this is the main reason why they are taking the project down, because it has not resulted in any good income streams. If they had opened GW for all when they started it, I’m pretty sure that it would have been huge today.

    However, I read somewhere that the ideal organization for the best innovation policy should not be higher than 15 employees…

    Reply

Pingbacks

  1. […] Scott Berkun was quick to pick up on this announcement and what it may represent. As a former Microsoft employee, Berkun has an interesting perspective on the announcement and possible repercussions for Google: When you see phrases like ‘extraordinary opportunities’, ‘prioritizing’, ‘process’ and ‘huge amounts of learning’, in reference to something being killed, you know you’re in the fantasy land of press releases. Winding down sounds oh so graceful, like winding down a party. And mentioning Google+, their current darling, is a well-played card. And the kicker of course is the by-line: […]

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