Il y a un passage qui me semble lié au présent billet.

Il est question de savoir/déterminer à quels types d’utilisateur Google cible ses produits.

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JS: So my question was more along the lines of, did you guys do some demographic research. Or did you find some people in some other part of the company that have some really detailed sense of the demographics of the user base via…

MP:… we don’t really tend to think that way at Google. We’re just really not wired that way. Because as soon as you get into that demographic stuff, it’s sort of hand-wavey pseudo-science stuff. We’re more like, let’s get it working really quick, and let’s give it out to 200 people and see what happens, which is what we did. We currently have about 225 Googlers who have gotten these machines [netbooks], and what we’re seeing is that a very large fraction of them are using it every week. We don’t know why, but they like it.

So we tend to be very data-driven. We try something, then we go measure the results. Every day when I come in, I look at the graph of usage and say, « Oh, it went up. OK, good. » If it starts dropping, I start worrying.
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Google incube ses propres startups sur des petits projets, plus flexibles, en se donnant la chance de voir ce que cela peut donner (i.e. en mesurant le succès après coup) – ce qui est nécessaire, car, comme Apple, les innovations technologiques vont fortement de pair avec des changements d’usage.

Bref, on retrouve chez Google une façon de faire similaire.