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Google’s culture isn’t responsible for its success
Faced with Google’s rampant success and dominance of the online world, legions of experts have tried over the years to dissect what makes it such a unique and powerful company.
Is it because its engineers famously get 20% of their time to develop their own projects? Is it the influence of the ’triumvirate’ of top executives? Or is it that Google simply understands the future better than the rest of the world?
Ask Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer why he thinks Google is theinternet’s most powerful company, however, and he’ll offer a straightforward alternative: it got there first.
Speaking at the SMX West conference in California on Tuesday, the man in charge of rival search engine Bing said that Google’s success today was not tangibly linked to the company’s culture, but simply spun out of the fact that it became successful in web search before its rivals.
"The number one thing that Google benefits from in search is that they did it right, first," he said. "There’s a value to incumbency."
"You can ascribe these things to things like culture, but it’s never clear which came first - incumbency or culture," he added.
Playing up Microsoft’s own culture and staff, Ballmer admitted that the software giant was late to produce a mature, usable search engine technology - despite launching the first MSN Search website as long ago as 1998. But with Bing slowly growing market share in the United States, he said that his eventual goal was to become the dominant engine.
"We’ve got great long-term optimism," he said. "Tomorrow’s goal is to gain a few points, a tenth here, a tenth there - just keep working and working."
His comments about culture will be seen as a sideswipe at Google, which has built a reputation based in part on its attempt to build a culture diametrically opposed to Microsoft’s.
But with Bing attempting to succeed in search, and Google launching its own web browsers, operating systems and office applications, the two companies have come into increasing conflict.
Most recently, Google claimed that complaints made to the European Commission about anti-competitive behaviour had been encouraged by Microsoft. That was exacerbated on Friday when the company took theunusual step of warning its rival that it could face antitrust problems in the future.
Ballmer told the audience of search engine professionals and advertisers that as an old hand with antitrust allegations - gathered during the company’s run-ins with the US government and European regulators - he would not let up the pressure on his rival.
"As in our case, a lot of times the initial complaints come from a competitor. We’re not being silent in this case, so we get involved," he said. "There are lots of places where it’s very hard to break through. I would love it if advertisers would share with us their experiences on Google."
He also scotched rumours that Microsoft could spend on purchasing either Facebook - in which it has previously invested - or Twitter, saying that both were already partners with the company and had more value as independent businesses.
"In some senses, as an independent [Twitter] has a lot of value and credibility - would they have that same credibility with their users if they were captive? Not clear," he said.
词句笔记：
rampant:猖獗的，大规模的
triumvirate: n. 三人执政，三头统治
incumbency:n.职责，义务
exacerbate:使恶化;使加重