The Google philosophy

The Google philosophy has 5 principles:

  • Work on things that matter,
  • Affect everyone in the world,
  • Solve problems with algorithms if possible (aka automate when possible to increase knowledge reuse),
  • Hire bright people and give them lots of freedom,
  • and don’t be afraid to try new things.

Microsoft’s Bill Gates echoes the fourth point. I recall his three ingredients for success were: smart people, small teams, and excellent tools.

Here’s another intriguing practice: Google requires that its engineers spend 20% of their time working on personal technology projects that have nothing to do with their primary objectives. Perhaps this is a way to prevent a narrow vision, a single-minded strive on sustaining their existing processes and technology, lest they fall prey to some disruptive technology barrelling in from left field.

Christensen said as much in an interview at the MIMC last month; only 80-85% of all R&D investments should be on sustaining innovation.

You can ping me for a date, any ol’ time

CSI is usually a show that takes delight in being as accurate as possible in its portrayal of forensic science, but the CSI:Miami episode I saw last night, “Big Brother”, had some awful flubs. Aside from the requisite cheesy Bejeweled-like graphical interface of “Grave Robber”, a fictitious file recovery program, and a bizarre looking command line ping program (that helpfully tells its user that an IP is spoofed with a blinking red “Forged” indicator), they also showed two malformed IP addresses.

The IP addresses went something like this: 301.101.28.1108. All valid network addresses must have their first octet between 0 and 223; “301” is way out of this range. As for “1108” at the end there, let’s just say only a number between 1 and 254 is valid.

But then they may have done this on purpose. In the same way that all fictitious phone numbers on TV have NPAs of 555, the producers felt they need fictitious IP addresses too.