“We always said it was like a startup,” Anderson wrote, “no risk if you failed.”
The layoffs, which totaled about 18,000 at Amazon, came with a hiring freeze, limiting internal movement options. Numerous company employees wrote to Mr. Anderson that his post had struck a nerve. They told him they expected to switch roles internally, he said, and that they would “never work on one of these crazy projects again.”
Still, employees remain excited to work on Amazon’s big bets, which include satellite internet, healthcare and self-driving taxis, said Brad Glasser, a company spokesman.
“The opportunity to work on projects that are transformational for clients at scale and to build and use cutting-edge technology is why so many employees join the company and grow their careers here,” he said.
Google has long been the symbol of big and unconventional ideas. In 2009, Page convinced Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun that after the company conquered the Internet, his next big thing would be to transform the real world.
Autonomous vehicles were one of several ideas Google began working on in the secretive division Thrun would start, Google X, dubbed the company’s “moon shooting factory.” Some efforts have succeeded, such as Google Brain, an artificial intelligence lab that is now part of the company’s research division. Others flopped, including Google Glass, augmented reality glasses that drew ridicule, and Loon, a scheme that intended to broadcast the Internet from giant balloons but never landed on a business model.
