Hard lesson learned from a couple of research projects within Google and then again from my first couple years as an entrepreneur:
Internal research is useless.
The only way to know whether a new idea will work is to try it: put some minimal form of it in front of people and see if they actually get use it. People are complex; sometimes they do things that all rational thought says they shouldn't (buying Bitcoin and investing in ICOs would both fit into that category, IMHO), and many times they don't do things that all rational analysis says they should (I participated in research projects while at Google for both micropayments for content and for labeling trustworthy sources on the results, both of which most people would agree are good goals but neither of which has ever worked, and I founded a startup afterwards to provide career guidance to undergrads, which every adult we talked to said "I love what you're doing, and totally wish that existed when I was a student" and every student said "I love that idea and would totally use it", and then promptly never looked at it again once we built it.)
There's no guarantee that external research works either, but at least you've learned something applicable to the next idea.
Take a look at Google Reader, though. They got skewered for dumping that. But despite being shuttered years after RSS was a thing, even then it was limited to RSS wonks like a lot of us who were the only ones lamenting it (and the decline of RSS).
Fast forward to today and 10x to 1000x the number of us wonks are getting an overlapping amount of Reader's value (plus new value) from Twitter. The purging of Reader is a distant memory, but it doesn't mean it's necessarily bad to try a bunch of things and kill the non-viral losers (in a relative sense).
Exactly. I don't think Google is making the wrong choice, given their size and prominence. I do think that making the right choice means that they inevitably lose their ability to innovate, and hence miss out on the next technology choice.
> The only way to know whether a new idea will work is to try it: put some minimal form of it in front of people and see if they actually get use it.
And in the face of a universe of potential ideas how do you determine whether you invest time into prototyping pre-sneezed tissues? Internal research. You’ve just moved the goal post.
Internal research is useless.
The only way to know whether a new idea will work is to try it: put some minimal form of it in front of people and see if they actually get use it. People are complex; sometimes they do things that all rational thought says they shouldn't (buying Bitcoin and investing in ICOs would both fit into that category, IMHO), and many times they don't do things that all rational analysis says they should (I participated in research projects while at Google for both micropayments for content and for labeling trustworthy sources on the results, both of which most people would agree are good goals but neither of which has ever worked, and I founded a startup afterwards to provide career guidance to undergrads, which every adult we talked to said "I love what you're doing, and totally wish that existed when I was a student" and every student said "I love that idea and would totally use it", and then promptly never looked at it again once we built it.)
There's no guarantee that external research works either, but at least you've learned something applicable to the next idea.