Oct

19

What do those people do?

October 19, 2007 |

Elinor Millis is asking what all those 16.000 people who work at Google actually do. Turns out that Google doubled it’s headcount within the last year and that has some analysts worried:

The fast pace of hiring at the search giant is the one concern Jordan Rohan, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, mentioned in an interview with CNET News.com after the Google earnings call.

“Half the company has been hired in the last 12 months. That’s chaotic,” he says. “The new employees find it difficult to figure out how to get things done. It’s not a normal company.”

image Now that’s the sign of a bad move right there, I think. Intel has a headcount of roughly 86.000 and they make real products that, in their complexity, go quite a bit beyond what Google does.

The think that has always irked me a bit about Google is that they hire the brightest people around, yet we hardly ever see a new product coming out of Google. Instead, they buy Jaiku or GrandCentral. All perfectly good and useful tools, but nothing Google’s army of PhDs couldn’t figure out by itself, I would think.

What’s Google’s problem? The advertising business is making them so much money, they basically don’t know what to do with it and so, instead of just printing money, they are throwing an army of worker bees at random problems, hoping that one of the monkeys will, in the end, type up the perfect business plan.

Well, at least they are planning to slow things down a bit.


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1 Comment so far

  1. ThePete on October 19, 2007 12:25 pm

    Between buying up some of the best ideas out there (and then making them ugly), becoming pretty damn ubiquitous, and in pretending the Chinese government isn’t a bad bunch of guys, Google is becoming more like Microsoft every day, I think. Still, they’re not Microsoft and in my mind that makes them better.

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