What Would Google Do?

Posted by Rich Crowley in books, google, links, networks

What Would Google Do? was written by Jeff Jarvis, founder of the popular buzzmachine.com blog.

I liked this book but didn’t love it. I’d give it a 7 out of 10. My main complaint is that I found about only a quarter of it useful. The rest seemed a bit fluffy and written mostly to create enough content to make it a book. The author himself says he is somewhat breaking his own rule by making this into a book when he claims mainstream publishing is dying and irrelevant.

Having said that, the parts I liked were excellent and more than justified the time and cost of absorbing the not so valuable parts.

Here are some of the things I took away from the book:

1. Google commodifies everything. What this means is that as we use google to search and find things on the web, we care less about where we found them than the fact that we found them with google. Acid test for me this weekend was my kids looking for a recipe for marinating halibut and me searching for toolbox plans. Both of us found what we were looking for and neither can tell you where we found them (ie. name of site, was it corporate sponsored or not, etc.)

2. Google hates middlemen. In its short life, google has significantly altered some industries by eliminating the need for middlemen. Think head-hunters, ad agencies, travel agencies (one of the first really damaged by google) and real-estate agents.

3. Google is in the business of organizing information. It does this around search, ads, maps, documents and more. Other killer web successes (flickr, amazon, etc.) help us organize ourselves too.

4. Privacy as we know it is gone. Get over it. I struggle with this one. I still think we have a choice about how much we make ourselves as individuals visible on the web but from a corporate standpoint, his point may be more relevant.

5. Networks are the new power structure. Individuals and organizations need to constantly be getting themselves added to networks that will help them. His story around this point is very compelling.

6. Be a platform. Facebook is a platform, Google is a platform, salesforce.com is a platform. If you can become a platform that others can use and then get out of the way, enabling them with your platform, and constantly improving it, will put you in good stead.

7. Do what you do best and link to the rest. There are too many smart people and organizations out there with good stuff for the world to consume. Try to compete with them with crappy stuff and it’s worse than having nothing out there at all.

8. Think distributed. I’ll let you grab to book to chase the details down on this one but it’s very intriguing as well.

He also devote a fair chunk of his book to explaining how google would run existing industries. Open-source cars anyone? Some of his ideas in this regard are way out there but hey, google is only 10+ years old and what is has accomplished seemed way out there 10 years ago too.