Changing perception on release cycles

Steve Levy’s article in last months Wired US, How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web is a fascinating read. It gives a great insight in to how Google works and just how much happens the moment after you enter a search term and hit the enter key. There are a number of references to Bing in there as you’d expect and notably an acknowledgement that Qi Lu who runs Bing is held in the highest regard by the Google team. I love the quote attributed to him

“It’s extremely important to keep in mind that this is a long-term journey.” He has the same I’m-not-going-away look in his eye that Uma Thurman has in Kill Bill.

I enjoy reading Levy a lot as he always get’s below the headline and gives you some insight, his viewpoint and often provokes you to think differently about something you’d taken for granted previously. The part that did this for me during this article was:

“Every couple of years there’s a major change in the system — sort of equivalent to a new version of Windows — that’s a big deal in Mountain View but not discussed publicly”

It made me think about how our worlds at Google and Microsoft are not quite so different and how language can shape perception of innovation and agility. Google updates their search engine (and other products like GAPE) relatively frequently with incremental features and tweaks as mentioned in the article. It’s often touted as innovation at web speed and clearly is the way people are becoming accustomed to updating their software rather than one or two year cycles of previous eras. I suspect things like Windows will always be on that multi year cycle (like Google search above) but perhaps things like Windows Live which adds features to Windows or even more pointedly Windows Update is akin to the Google model of more frequent updates. There is a distinction of course between perpetual beta but Windows Update delivers just that, updates to the operating system or applications. Sometimes they’re what we’d consider fixes but the distinction between a fix and a feature can sometimes get blurry too.

What’s my point? Really just that Levy helped me think about things in a different way by exposing the approach Google takes. They have multi year release cycles and much faster, incremental cycles. Whilst there are some obvious areas where we differ with longer release cycles, there is more similarity here than perhaps has been obvious in the past.