Google on " Innovation, not instant perfection "

"There are two different types of programmers. Some like to code for months or even years, and hope they will have built the perfect product. That's castle building. Companies work this way, too. Apple is great at it. If you get it right and you've built just the perfect thing, you get this worldwide 'Wow!' The problem is, if you get it wrong, you get a thud, a thud in which you've spent, like, five years and 100 people on something the market doesn't want."

"Others prefer to have something working at the end of the day, something to refine and improve the next day. That's what we do: our 'launch early and often' strategy. The hardest part about indoctrinating people into our culture is when engineers show me a prototype and I'm like, 'Great, let's go!' They'll say, 'Oh, no, it's not ready.

It's not up to Google standards. This doesn't look like a Google product yet.' They want to castle-build and do all these other features and make it all perfect."

"I tell them, 'The Googly thing is to launch it early on Google Labs and then iterate, learning what the market wants--and making it great.' The beauty of experimenting in this way is that you never get too far from what the market wants. The market pulls you back."

 

Source:http://specials.rediff.com/money/2008/mar/11google2.htm

Some facts on Patents

Here are a few facts on Patents highlighting importance of them to a company:

 

 

• IBM generates revenue approximately US $1 billion from licensing its IP

• Infosys earned close to $300 million (10% of the revenue) purely from patent pending IP in 2006.

• Start-up ventures in late 19th century and early 20th century Japan became industrial giants and pillars of the Japanese economy –Toyota, Matsushita, Sony and Honda – thanks to the patented inventions of their founders.

• There has been a rise in patenting front from the Indian companies like Dr. Reddy's Laboratories has filed 205 patents from 1995- 2005, Ranbaxy 259, Biocon 800

• India is a hub of patent filing ideas for the IT based U.S. companies. Indian units of Cisco Systems, Intel, IBM, Texas Instruments, GE have filed 1,000 patent applications with the US Patent Office and Texas Instruments has 225 US patents awarded to its operations in India. Wipro  an Indian software company has filed 13 patents in 2007, while Infosys' SETLabs has generated over 82 invention disclosures and filed over 20 patents.