"Yes, it's making gobs of money. Yes, it's full of smart people. Yes, it's a wonderful place to work. So why are so many people leaving?" wonders Fortune magazine. (Er, don't forget the free gourmet food!)
One reason is that they don't have to wade though Google's bureaucracy. The three founders of a start-up called Ooyala, for example, say that "what they lack in institutional backing they make up for in speed and the ability to communicate with one another by turning around in their chairs and talking. Google was like that too, about eight years and 18,000 employees ago."
Another is that Google's product strategy isn't particularly coherent as staff exploit their "20% time":
The dabbling often results in duplicated efforts -- or products stuck in also-ran status. Google Page Creator, an early-stage product that nevertheless was publicly released in 2006, does about the same thing as Google Sites, a newer offering. "Even on Web search, there were multiple teams working on similar projects," says Ooyala's Knapp. Google Checkout is a payment system in which Google has invested heavily, yet it remains far behind eBay's PayPal unit in market share. It doesn't help matters that eBay is a major Google customer, but that's another story.
Google is, of course, extremely sensitive to the observation that it's a one-trick pony. Indeed, it gets the author a phone call from "Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com and a Google business partner" -- which leads to by far the best quote in the story.
"What they need to do is build a full portfolio of revenue, as Microsoft has," says Benioff. "They have a fantastic cash cow. They need a goat and a chicken."
