Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever

by Alex Kantrowitz

“We had to go beyond a single idea from Sundar and really start to pull in the collective wisdom of a broader set of people to say, ‘How are we going to take this broad idea and make it into something much more concrete, much more specific?’” Fitzpatrick said. “That’s really when you get into the broader, cross-company collaboration.” This style of invention was a departure from the last major Google-wide project, Google+, which took a more centralized approach and failed. “Instead of an Assistant team coming back and saying, ‘Hey, this is what we want, we want all of you to do A, B, and C,’ it took this bottom-up innovation in all the teams, and gave it a label,” Shiva Rajaraman, a former Google product management executive, told me. “That’s the secret of collaboration at Google. When these teams come together and can amplify what they do because the company’s attention is on it, it works really well.”