Google's next 25 years may be more difficult than its first
Since 1998, Google has grown from a garage experiment into a US$1.7 trillion giant. But as it celebrates its first quarter century, serious challenges loom.
When Michael Stocks began his stint at Google Australia as product marketing manager in 2014, the local outfit was small enough that he knew most people by face, if not by name. By the time he left five years later, staff numbers had more than doubled to over 1400.
“Being in the Australian office, we were more startup-y and cheeky,” he said, recalling the time he worked with engineers to put sausage sizzle locations into Google Maps on an election day.
“Globally, Google definitely felt slowed down,” said Stocks, who also worked for a time at Google’s New York offices. “Once you’re over 100,000 people, just out of necessity you’re going to have to put a bunch more layers and infrastructure in different processes, and I think it lost a bit of agility and pizzazz.”
Stocks’ time at Google represents just one fifth of the company’s lifespan: it celebrated its 25th birthday on 4 September. During that time Google has evolved from a garage experiment to the fourth-biggest company in the world by market cap. In 2022, its parent company Alphabet made USD60 billion in profit — and that was considered a bad year.
