Always Day One

This soft-handed approach won Pichai trust across divisions inside Google, and from Google’s founders.

Apple designers do not typically hand off projects. They stay close from beginning to end, minimizing the buck passing that’s typical inside companies that create “good enough” products.

But to give Siri the best chance to succeed, the company needed to lose its refiner’s mindset. It would have to dispense with the silos and secrecy, allowing the Siri team to mingle with other divisions to see how their products could fit in as Google did on its Assistant project.

“One of the things that I hope to do—and that I hope we do in AR and VR—is influence the direction of the next computing platform to be more focused on the organizational principle, making it around people, rather than just tasks,”

When the engineers sought to build a feedback tool, design rebuffed them, as asking people to evaluate Siri’s performance would lessen its supernatural appearance. Without feedback, the engineers struggled to improve the assistant.

PowerPoint, Bezos understood, is a terrific selling tool, making mediocre ideas look great by dressing them up in bullet points and fancy templates. For the same reasons, it’s terrible for inventing, giving people “permission to gloss over ideas,” as he put it, often yielding flawed or incomplete concepts, even if it didn’t seem so at the time of p

place of Jobs, six Apple executives drive the company today, delivering ideas that the rest of the company executes. They are: Tim Cook, the unassuming CEO with an operations background. Eddy Cue, the colorful senior vice president of software and services. Phil Schiller, the deceptively powerful head of product marketing. Jeff Williams, the chief

“You can’t order food online, you can’t call an Uber or a Lyft with it. You can’t have it read calendar events or set any calendar events. You can’t set multiple timers at the same time, only one at a time, which seems like something you would do in a kitchen with a smart speaker. You can’t have it make phone calls via your voice—again, that’s some

Google search has gone through many evolutions: It began as a website, but after Microsoft cut its distribution on Internet Explorer, it reinvented itself as a browser, Chrome. Then, when browsing moved from desktop to mobile, Google reinvented again, placing search at the heart of a mobile operating system, Android. Now, as people operate mobile d