The problems of being big

Being big means: lots of influence on your market, on society, on the lives of others. The advantage of being big is that you’re more established and have greater access to funding. You enjoy more repeat business, which generates higher sales and larger profits than smaller scale companies. It’s easier to establish multiple revenue streams to help offset economic downturns. Most of the time, ‘big’ also means major investments in development (for example, we invested $47 billion capex in Google Cloud in the past three years), greater responsibilities, and a higher profile.

Being big also has its downsides. The bigger you get, the more layers of management emerge, together with the need for consensus, inefficiency, tons of legacy, and major loss of innovative capacity and change. The Lean Methods group made a top 10 list of problems for businesses to solve in the coming years. On the list are topics such as uncertainty, globalization, innovation, regulation, complexity, and information overload.

Think small
Forbes journalist Chris Vander Mey wrote an interesting article called ‘Why Big Companies Go Bad and How to Cope by Thinking Small’. His statement: when a company gets big, it has some benefits but it also has some major drawbacks. The trick is to compensate for these drawbacks by thinking small. Small as in these three rules:

• Don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness
• Don't ask for help, solve your problems with the simplest possible solution
• Ignore the management and politics

One of the things we try to secure, while growing rapidly, is our organizational culture. The essence of this corporate culture is to motivate employees to share information for the purpose of supporting innovation. We, as Google Cloud, can help you via our way of working with agility and innovation, for example in our custom innovation workshops for large enterprises.

Trust, trust, trust
Another big company issue is the issue of position and trust. We are one of the most trusted companies on the planet, but it’s more than difficult to continuously earn this trust. As you know, the European Commission issued a competition decision against Android and its business model. Rapid innovation, wide choice, and falling prices are classic hallmarks of robust competition, and that Android has enabled all of them. We believe that Android has created more choice, not less. So instead of being fined, for us it was only logical to be rewarded by the EU. How do you do the right things right? Being in the forefront of publicity and public opinion, the only solution is transparency and openness. Even when it means it backfires on the short term. Our mission is “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Whatever we do or plan to do, múst relate to that mission.

We explain our approach to security by providing detailed documentation about Google Cloud’s approach to security and compliance for our suite of products and services. In addition, we process your data only according to our data protection agreements. This means that you control how your businesses data is used. We provide deletion commitments, as well as transparency on subprocessing by vendors (such as support services. Last, we clearly outline our policies on government requests. In transparency reports we share our insights about how the policies and actions of governments and corporations affect privacy, security and access to information. We also detail our process for responding government requests in public white papers.