What Would Google Do?

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Jeff Jarvis For Tammy, Jake, and Julia Contents WWGD? 1 Google Rules 9 New Relationship 11 • Give the people control and we will use it • Dell hell • Your worst customer is your best friend • Your best customer is your partner New Architecture 24 • The link changes everything • Do what you do best and link to the rest • Join a network • Be a platform • Th ink distributed New Publicness 40 • If you’re not searchable, you won’t be found • Everybody needs Googlejuice • Life is public, so is business • Your customers are your ad agency New Society 48 • E l e g a n t o r g a n i z a t i o n New Economy 54 • Small is the new big • The post-scarcity economy • Join the open- source, gift economy • The mass market is dead—long live the mass of niches iv Contents • Google commodifi es everything • Welcome to the Google economy New Business Reality 70 • Atoms are a drag • Middlemen are doomed • Free is a business model • Decide what business you’re in New Attitude 82 • There is an inverse relationship between control and trust • Trust the people • Listen New Ethic 91 • Make mistakes well • Life is a beta • Be honest • Be transparent • Collaborate • Don’t be evil New Speed 103 • Answers are instantaneous • Life is live • Mobs form in a fl ash New Imperatives 109 • Beware the cash cow in the coal mine • Encourage, enable, and protect innovation • Simplify, simplify • Get out of the way If Google Ruled the World 119 Media 123 • The Google Times: Newspapers, post-paper • Googlewood: Entertainment, opened up • GoogleCollins: Killing the book to save it Contents v Advertising 145 • And now, a word from Google’s sponsors Retail 153 • Google Eats: A business built on openness • Google Shops: A company built on people Utilities 162 • Google Power & Light: What Google would do • GT&T: What Google should do Manufacturing 172 • The Googlemobile: From secrecy to sharing • Google Cola: We’re more than consumers Ser vice 182 • Google Air: A social marketplace of customers • Google Real Estate: Information is power Money 189 • Google Capital: Money makes networks • The First Bank of Google: Markets minus middlemen Public Welfare 199 • St. Google’s Hospital: Th e benefi ts of publicness • Google Mutual Insurance: The business of cooperation Public Institutions 210 • Google U: Opening education • The United States of Google: Geeks rule Exceptions 222 • PR and lawyers: Hopeless • God and Apple: Beyond Google? Generation G 229 Continuing the conversation 243 Ac know ledg ments and disclosures 245 Index 247 About the Author Credits Cover Copyright About the Publisher WWGD? It seems as if no company, executive, or institution truly understands how to survive and prosper in the internet age. Except Google. So, faced with most any challenge today, it makes sense to ask: WWGD? What would Google do? In management, commerce, news, media, manufacturing, marketing, service industries, investing, politics, government, and even education and religion, answering that question is a key to navigating a world that has changed radically and forever. That world is upside-down, inside-out, counterintuitive, and confusing. Who could have imagined that a free classifi ed service could have had a profound and permanent effect on the entire newspaper industry, that kids with cameras and internet connections could gather larger audiences than cable networks could, that loners with keyboards could bring down politi- cians and companies, and that dropouts could build companies worth billions? They didn’t do it by breaking rules. They operate by new rules of a new age, among them: • Customers are now in charge. They can be heard around the globe and have an impact on huge institutions in an instant. • People can find each other anywhere and coalesce around you—or against you. • The mass market is dead, replaced by the mass of niches. • “Markets are conversations,” decreed The Cluetrain Manifesto, the seminal work of the internet age, in 2000. That means the key skill in any organization today is no longer marketing but conversing. • We have shifted from an economy based on scarcity to one based on abundance. The control of products or distribution will no longer guarantee a premium and a profi t. • Enabling customers to collaborate with you—in creating, distributing, 4 What Would Google Do? marketing, and supporting products—is what creates a premium in today’s market. • The most successful enterprises today are networks—which extract as little value as possible so they can grow as big as possible—and the platforms on which those networks are built. • Owning pipelines, people, products, or even intellectual property is no longer the key to success. Openness is. Google’s found ers and executives understand the change brought by the internet. That is why they are so successful and powerful, running what Th e Times of London dubbed “the fastest growing company in the history of the world.” The same is true of a few disruptive capitalists and quasi-capitalists such as Mark Zuckerberg, found er of Facebook; Craig Newmark, who calls himself founder and customer service representative—no joke—at craigs- list; Jimmy Wales, cofound er of Wikipedia; Jeff Bezos, found er of Ama- zon; and Kevin Rose, creator of Digg. They see a different world than the rest of us and make different decisions as a result, decisions that make no sense under old rules of old industries that are now blown apart thanks to these new ways and new thinkers. That is why the smart response to all this change is to ask what these disrupters—what Mark, Craig, Jimmy, Jeff, Kevin, and, of course, Google—would do. Google generously shares its own philosophy on its web site, setting out the “10 things Google has found to be true.” Th ey are smart but obvious PowerPoint lines helpful in employee indoctrination (especially necessary when your headcount explodes by 50 percent in a year—to 16,000 at the end of 2007 and to 20,000 before the end of the following year): “Focus on the user and all else will follow,” Google de- crees. “It’s best to do one thing really, really well. Fast is better than slow. You can make money without doing evil. There’s always more information out there. The need for information crosses all borders. .” These are useful, but they don’t tell the entire story. There’s more to learn from watching Google. The question I ask in the title is about thinking in new ways, facing new challenges, solving problems with new solutions, seeing new oppor- tunities, and understanding a different way to look at the structure of the economy and society. I try to see the world as Google sees it, analyzing Jeff Jarvis 5 and deconstructing its success from a distance so we can apply what we learn to our own companies, institutions, and careers. Together, we will reverse-engineer Google. You can bring this same discipline to other com- petitors, companies, and leaders whose success you find puzzling but ad- mirable. In fact, you must. Google is our model for thinking in new ways because it is so singu- larly successful. Hitwise, which measures internet traffi c, reported that Google had 71 percent share of searches in the United States and 87 percent in the United Kingdom in 2008. With its acquisition of ad- serving company DoubleClick in 2008, Google controlled 69 percent of online ad serving, according to Attributor, and 24 percent of online ad revenue, according to IDC. In the U.K., Google’s ad revenue grew past the largest single commercial TV entity, ITV, in 2008, and it is next expected to surpass the revenue of all British national newspapers combined. It is still exploding: Google’s traffic in 2007 was up 22.4 percent in a year. Google no longer says how many servers its runs—estimates run into the millions— and it has stopped saying how many pages it monitors, but when it started in 1998, it indexed 26 million pages; by 2000, it tracked one billion; and in mid-2008 it said it followed one trillion web addresses. In 2007 and again in 2008, says the Millward Brown BrandZ Top 100, Google was the number one brand in the world. By contrast, Yahoo and AOL, each a former king of the online hill, are already has- beens. They operate under the old rules. They control content and distribution and think they can own customers, relationships, and at- tention. They create destinations and have the hubris to think customers should come to them. They spend a huge proportion of their revenue on marketing to get those people there and work hard to keep them there. Yahoo! is the last old-media company. Google is the fi rst post-media company. Unlike Yahoo, Google is not a portal. It is a network and a platform. Google thinks in distributed ways. It goes to the people. There are bits of Google spread all over the web. About a third of Google’s revenue—expected to total $20 billion in 2008—is earned not at Google.com but at sites all over the internet. Here’s how they do it: The Google AdSense box on the home page of my blog, Buzzmachine.com, makes me part of Google’s empire.

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