Data-Driven Decisions?

Google is a company that is managed by engineers and has and extremely rigorous data-driven decision making process. I've touched on this before in past posts, and now I'd like to give an opposing opinion, presented in two articles by Chris Matyszczyk.

Is Google far too much in love with engineering?

"Is it really possible that there exist so few human beings beyond the educationally superior dome of Google who might not be able to muster an idea or two about how Google might market its highly complex engineering products? You know, like those highly complex all-copy ads that sit at the side of search results?"

"Does one really need a background in engineering to wonder how best to offer real people, whose closest relationship to engineering might come every time they go over a bridge while humming along with their iPods, a browser?"

"However, I wonder whether such slight, but no doubt data-driven, infelicities, such as the launch of Google Buzz, the riotously misguided home page designs, or the launch of Nexus One, might have done with one or two fewer data-driven managers and one or two more people who offered suggestions about what real people like and how they might react?"


What Google should learn from Apple

"If Apple had been a purely data-driven company, would its products have ever looked as they do? And would its products ever have sold as they have?"

"...can anyone dispute that someone, somewhere along the line at Apple, made a judgment--a human, instinctive judgment--about what looks good and what doesn't?"

"Someone said, 'I think,' or 'I feel,' rather than, 'The numbers tell me.' And though I know it annoys some, Apple proved that people would pay more to be part of that tasteful world."

"The fact is that human beings are astoundingly, depressingly, maddeningly human. Which makes them irrational, contradictory, capricious and, sometimes, just plain nuts."

"Apple recognized this from the beginning. The company understood that technology had to recognize humanity's irrationality and emotionality, with all the risk and subjectivity that entailed."

"I suspect that Google wasn't quite so data-dependent at the company's inception. Do you really think that if the company used the same research methods then as it uses now to, for example, name itself, that 'Google' would have been the winner?"

"My subjective feeling is that the company would have been called 'SearchThis.' Or, perhaps, 'FindOut.' How many of us would be searchthising or findouting today?"


Past posts of mine mentioning Google's decision making process:

June 27, 2010
Working at Google

May 5, 2010
Google's New Look ... And How Google Decides?