Google's Failures are a Good Thing

Many management consultants would say that the typical company learns faster when it tries new things faster, accelerating the rate at which it can sort the good ideas from the bad.

Few firms actually practice what the consultants preach very well. Failure still gets punished, and the bigger the failure the bigger the punishment. Google is among the firms that fail fast and frequently, and that is a good thing. The faster it sorts through initiatives that don't work, the faster it will stumble upon the good ideas.

Though people tend to remember the successes and forget the failures, given a sufficient passage of time, both Apple and Google have failed at some initiatives, in Google's case many initiatives.

That's a good thing, not a bad thing. Google is set up so that failure is not dangerous to the company's core business. That isn't always the case at other firms.

Some will defend a slower pace of trial and error precisely for that reason: some firms cannot handle a major failure as they experiment. That is one reason why it is good to have a platform that allows frequent innovations to be tested, at low or reasonable cost.

In a business where good ideas have to be discovered, there is almost no way around experimentation and failure. Companies simply need to improve their prototyping and testing processes, with the caveat that some companies (software firms, especially) have inherent advantages in that regard, and always will. That's why much, perhaps most, meaningful innovation now comes in businesses that are driven by software.

Google doesn't so much fail as experiment faster, and more frequently, than most companies can.