Three years ago, Fast Company published an article about Google focusing on why the company is successful.
They picked out 5 rules that are still relevant today … and sound oddly web 2-ish. Here they are … through the John filter:
- The user is in charge
Find out what the people who are using your service want. Find out what they’re doing. Give them more of it. And continuously always incessantly keep taking obstacles out of their way. - Open up – let people play
All of us are smarter than some of us, most of the time. So let people use your stuff. Intentionally build it so that as many people as possible can do as many things as possible – things that you can’t anticipate or predict. Some of them will be interesting. - Fail often, fail fast, fail cheap, but most importantly: learn
Just try lots of stuff. Let your engineers play. Don’t scale until you know you have a winner, but let a thousand flowers bloom. But, but, but, when you fail, make sure you understand why. Failure’s OK. Failing to understand why is not. - Small teams of smart people managing themselves
Command-and-control is dead with a spike in its head. Success today means small smart lean mobile teams that can achieve a lot quickly. Flatten! - Money follows value
First, build something incredibly amazing, incredibly important, incredibly valuable. Then the money will follow. Forget the first because you’re so focused on monetization, and you’re never get to the cash.
What do you know – web 2.0 in 2003!