TAG

# Product Decisions

2026-09-02

Google Didn't Invent Search. It Bought the Ad Model in a Settlement

Second on my board is Google Search, at 97. But when it launched in September 1998, WebCrawler, Lycos, Infoseek, Excite and AltaVista were already running — and the paid-auction model that made it rich belonged to someone else. Overture sued for two years; the 2004 settlement cost Google 2.7 million shares. Neither of its two core pieces was original. It now holds 91.32% of global search.

2026-09-01

The iPhone Ranks First on My Board. On the Day It Shipped, It Couldn't Copy and Paste

I scored 99 products; the iPhone came first at 98. But lay out its first eighteen months and almost everything went wrong: no third-party apps, no copy-paste, no video recording, no MMS, 2G only, a $200 price cut 68 days after launch, and a public apology from Jobs. It got exactly one thing right — and that one thing happened to be the only one nobody could retrofit.

2026-08-12

The Greatest Product Managers, No. 10: Shigeru Miyamoto — He Handed Over Mario's Day-to-Day and Kept Exactly One Thing: He Plays the First 30 Minutes of Every Game Himself

At 72, Shigeru Miyamoto is Nintendo's Executive Fellow and a Representative Director, and has formally stepped back from day-to-day work on the Super Mario series, handing it to a younger generation. He kept one action: he personally plays roughly the first 30 minutes of every game, to check whether it feels like Mario. He ranks 10th on our board, OVR 95: taste 99 and originality 99 are top of the entire list, while business 88 and scale 92 are the two lowest numbers in the top ten — the exact mirror of Gates (business 99, originality 94), written yesterday. This piece is about succession: the one thing a person keeps when they let go is the judgment they believe cannot be delegated.

2026-08-11

The Greatest Product Managers, No. 8: Bill Gates — He Wrote an End Date for His Own Organization: Close at the End of 2045, After Spending $200 Billion

On January 14, 2026, the Gates Foundation's board approved a $9 billion annual budget and confirmed the foundation will close permanently at the end of 2045. Before it does, it will spend another $200 billion — double what it spent in its first 25 years — while cutting about 500 roles over the next five years. Not because money is short. Because it has to finish on time. Writing an end date for your own organization is a rare move: nearly every organization's implicit goal is to survive. He ranks 8th on our board with an OVR of 95. Business 99 is the top bracket of the entire list; originality 94 is the lowest in the top ten. He was never the inventor. Fifty years ago he put other people's inventions on every desk; today he is distributing $200 billion against a deadline. He is also the only person in the top ten still writing on his own personal website.

2026-08-10

They Organized the World's Information. Their Own Homepages Stopped in 1998 — and Still Say They're 'Currently Working on Google, a Search Engine for the Web'

On August 10, 2026, I pasted infolab.stanford.edu/~page/ and ~sergey/ into a terminal. Both returned 200. Page's is titled 'Lawrence or Larry Page's Page'; it lists him as a Ph.D. Student, office Gates 360, phone (650) 330-0100, and one line of body text: Currently working on Google, a search engine for the Web. Brin's says Currently I am at Google and In fall '98 I taught CS 349, with a paper co-authored with Page marked Work in progress. Twenty-eight years, not one edit. Meanwhile one of them is now at Google almost every day helping train Gemini, and the other crossed $300 billion in net worth on April 30 this year and went off to do AI manufacturing. This piece is about the thing product managers most reliably overestimate: how they describe a project on the day it starts.

2026-08-09

How Expensive Can One Product Judgment Get? Zuckerberg Renamed the Company Meta for the Metaverse, Burned $80 Billion in Four Years, and Is Now Cutting the Budget

In 2025 Reality Labs booked $2.21 billion in revenue and a $19.19 billion operating loss — it lost $8.70 for every dollar it took in. That was the fourth full year after Zuckerberg renamed Facebook to Meta on October 28, 2021, and the fifth straight year the loss curve widened, with not one year of narrowing in between. Bloomberg reported in December 2025 that Meta's 2026 budget would cut the metaverse division by up to 30%, while every other department was asked to find 10%. The savings went to AI glasses. One line in the original rename announcement usually gets skipped: the ticker was to change from FB to MVRS on December 1 — a symbol that never traded a single day, because what actually listed on June 9, 2022 was META. He ranks 9th on our board with an OVR of 95: scale 99, insight 96, and a vision score of 94, the lowest in the top ten. This piece is about the bill product managers habitually underestimate: the cost of retreat depends on which layer you bound the judgment to.