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Exodus from DodgeBall - Google’s Growth Working Against Innovation?

Om covers the departure of DodgeBall’s founder and first employee from the Googleplex. Of particular note is the comment in the departing team member’s announcement:

It’s no real secret that Google wasn’t supporting dodgeball the way we expected. The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us - especially as we couldn’t convince them that dodgeball was worth engineering resources, leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space.

Sheesh - fighting for engineering resources. Sounds like something more likely to happen at IBM, Microsoft, EDS, or some other lumbering 1.0 titan - not everyone’s favorite wizard of innovation. This is where I question Google’s scattershot approach to prioritization - why does Google pump resources into something like Google Base, Google Bus Routes, or Froogle, while viable acquisitions die on the vine?

If you’re losing presumably valuable people (you paid for them) and flatlining acquisitions (that were previously media superstars), its time to re-visit your internal prioritizion system.

EDIT: Scoble makes a parallel point - that Google has gotten “big company disease” and is no longer able to understand/leverage/utilize things below a certain scale threshold. This is similar to what I mentioned above - Google’s prioritization is skewing away from small/nimble/innovative towards large/slow/monolithic.

dodgeball, google, jaiku, sms, techfold twitter

4 Responses to “Exodus from DodgeBall - Google’s Growth Working Against Innovation?”

Carol J. | April 18th, 2007 at 3:06 pm

I hope the Dodgeball guys find a new place to put their creative energies. I used to be a Dodgeball user, but switched to twitter and now have switched off from all of these friend tracking services. Back to simple emails and phone calls.
Rod | April 18th, 2007 at 3:20 pm

I hear you - I feel totally recidivistic never being on IM services, or using Twitter, Jaiku, etc. For about 4 years I even ditched owning a cellphone - nothing I do is important enough that instant availability is mission critical. Got one now for the convenience factor, however.

Anyway - yes, good luck to the dodgeballers.
Google Disasterous with the Letter D | April 18th, 2007 at 5:48 pm

[…] Dodgeball Founder Departure - April, 2007 post […]
Google’s Doing It Again: Jaiku dying on the vine? « TechFold | January 10th, 2008 at 6:31 pm

[…] (presumably) the talent behind them is employed elsewhere in the Googleplex. The seminal example is DodgeBall,, who’s founder’s public departure from Google lead many to question Google’s […]