Qual è la logica dietro alle decisioni che prende Google

Un’ottima analisi di Michael Mace sul Guardian, sul perché Google fa le cose nella maniera in cui le fa — perché acquista Motorola, chiude Google Reader, fa incazzare gli utenti e ne lascia basiti altri:

Google is completely controlled by engineering PhDs. […] One key element of the engineering mindset is the use of scientific method: you encourage a Darwinian marketplace of ideas, you test those ideas through controlled experiments, and you make decisions based on experimental data. In its behaviour and vocabulary, Google oozes scientific method. A couple of times recently I’ve heard Google executives say in public, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”. […]

That’s a very scientific, rational point of view, but I couldn’t help thinking that if you had said something like that to Steve Jobs, he would have taken your head off with a dull knife. The whole idea of vision at a place like Apple is that you pursue things you can’t fully quantify or measure; that great product design is an art, and the most important changes are the ones you intuit rather than prove in advance.

But engineers are trained not to act on intuition. You are allowed to have intuition, of course, but you use it to make hypotheses, which you then test. You act on the results of those tests.