Now that I’ve fully (perhaps too much so) explained the analogy that I will be using, I’d like to ground this discussion in the subject of information retrieval. And I’ll start with an example that O’Reilly used in his talk: Google. (This is an Information Retrieval blog, after all, and Google was the example that Tim used.) The company, he says, successfully exhibits both long term and evolutionary thinking. It takes the long term view through its very mission statement: “To organize the world’s information”. What could be more long term, more global, than that? At the same time, Google has a very evolutionary approach in that it starts with simple, elegant solutions and couples them with ongoing user measurements. If and when changes to Google’s engine are made, they are made based on small evolutionary steps that become apparent through the actions of the user. It’s a point of pride within the Google organization that every change to the engine is scrupulously measured and A/B tested so as to be able to tell whether the change was better or worse. The user provides the fitness function, the arrow that points in the uphill direction, toward which the search engine evolves.
So the question is, does Google suffer from this conflict between long term and evolutionary thinking? My contention is that they do.
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