[Evolution] A decade of Google Hrush Dec 17, 2008

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Following up from our previous post on Amazon’s evolution and road to profitability, we’re taking a quick look at Google in this post.

Like Amazon, Google was notoriously focused on the long term of their business. As the timeline chart below shows, they obsessed with search for 4 long years–they worked on only one product and focused on making that product better, making it more accessible by launching in multiple languages and garnering a wider audience by sealing partnership deals with high-traffic properties that were not focused on search.

Google is a remarkable company and much of what they have achieved in the last decade has come from their willingness to focus and deliver long-term value, rather than concentrate on meeting quarterly growth targets. When Google filed for an IPO, its founders wrote a letter to prospective shareholders where they declared that they planned to continue managing the company with a long term instead of near term focus:

A management team distracted by a series of short term targets is as pointless as a dieter stepping on a scale every half hour.

That’s a great analogy for a great approach–thinking further down the road has clearly worked for Google, enabling them to concentrate on the things that matter instead of bending themselves out of shape to meet the numbers for the quarter.