Ch. 11 - Developing and Managing Products

Google is toiling to create some blockbuster successes beyond its Internet search engine. Carl Sjogreen, who led the development of Google Calendar, provided a deep look into how Google develops products during a presentation at The Future of Web Apps Summit.  What follows is a play-by-play of his presentation, which is self-explanatory. Search-engine giant Google has a secret product lab called Google X feverishly developing blue-sky projects such as space elevators, driverless cars and internet-enabled household devices, The New York Times reports. The labs are reportedly run "as mysteriously as the CIA," according to unnamed sources familiar with the project, and housed in two facilities - one in California at the company's headquarters and one in an undisclosed location elsewhere in the country. "They're pretty far out in front right now," Rodney Brooks, a professor emeritus at MIT's computer science and artificial intelligence lab and founder of Heartland Robotics, told the Times. "But Google's not an ordinary company, so almost nothing applies." The lab is reported to be filled with robotics engineers, in spite of the software engineers more commonly employed by the company. But don't get your hopes up: The types of projects cited aren't the sort of thing the company will be releasing anytime soon. Space elevators, for example, are a concept common in science fiction stories and movies. The idea is simple: Ditch the expensive, dangerous rockets for a giant platform that tows anything and everything up a tremendous cable to a platform orbiting at a fixed location around the planet.