Ballmer: Google’s culture isn’t responsible for its success
Faced with Google’s rampant success and dominance of the online world, legions of experts have tried over the years to dissect what makes it such a unique and powerful company.
Is it because its engineers famously get 20% of their time to develop their own projects? Is it the influence of the ‘triumvirate’ of top executives? Or is it that Google simply understands the future better than the rest of the world?
Ask Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer why he thinks Google is the internet’s most powerful company, however, and he’ll offer a straightforward alternative: it got there first.
Speaking at the SMX West conference in California on Tuesday, the man in charge of rival search engine Bing said that Google’s success today was not tangibly linked to the company’s culture, but simply spun out of the fact that it became successful in web search before its rivals.
“The number one thing that Google benefits from in search is that they did it right, first,” he said. “There’s a value to incumbency.”