This is a fantastic analysis...
Its author, Jeff Jarvis, is a trained journalist who covered New Media stories in business and is now a graduate school professor at NYU and practices equally as a consultant and business speaker.
" What Would Google Do" is a book about seeing the world through Google's glasses. The book is organized into two parts.
" What Would Google Do" is a book about seeing the world through Google's glasses. The book is organized into two parts.
In the first part, Jarvis translates Google's way of doing business into a set of rules (about 30 in total). Some of the most critical include:
- Give the people trust, and we will use it. Don't, and you will lose it. The dominant (companies, institutions, and governments) used to be in charge because of their control, but the world has changed. They can get it back by simply being more transparent and listening to their customers.
- Your customer is your advertising agency: Google spends almost nothing on advertising; people spread the word for them (the buzz effect). Let your customers do that for you.
- Join the Open Source, Gift Economy: Your customers will help you if you ask them. People like to be generous (look at Wikipedia, for example).
The masses are dead, long live the niches: Aggregation of the long tail replaces the mass (Andersen's ideas about the long-tail). For example, no online video may hit the ratings of "Terminator," but together, they will capture a vast audience.
Free is a business model: Google will find ways to make money by offering free services. Charging money costs money.
- Make mistakes well: It can be a good thing to make mistakes, but it depends on how you handle them. Corrections enhance credibility. You don't need to launch the perfect product. Your customers can (and will) help you to improve it. Google is always working with beta versions of its applications.
In the second part of the book, Jarvis describes these aggregate rules (Google business model) over many different industries.
These industries will be forced to change and become winners by changing faster than the competition - or lose everything if they believe that their current business model will survive.
Here become essential the rule of the first part, "the middlemen are doomed." The middleman should disappear because we don't need them anymore (an Internet effect).
For example, Jarvis examines the way Google would run a newspaper. You should keep in mind that Jarvis wrote these things well before large American newspapers fall into severe financial distress.
The same applies to real estate agents who are now challenged in the US by Craiglist's advertisements.
From media to advertising, from retail to manufacturing, from the service industry to banking, health, and school, and so on, Google's model would have a huge impact.
The final part of the book, Generation G, is about Google's impact on anyone's personal life. Google will keep people connected: young people will stay linked, likely for the rest of their lives. Past mistakes will be visible forever, but if you made mistakes, it not a big issue because everybody makes them.
This age of transparency will be an age of forgiveness (in Life is a beta). Privacy is not anymore an issue. The new generations are putting their lives online because sharing information is the basis of connections. And the sharing brings social benefits that outweigh risks.
This book confirms some of my intuitions.
Google is a media company, enormous, excellent, providing highly demanded assets (information). Its business model is based on revenue streams from advertising.
This can apply only to newspapers, magazines, professional sports teams, film producers, and TV stations. The `Google way' will refer to them, and only a few will survive the next `transformation'). It will also apply to the middlemen who will disappear (eventually surviving around another kind of service).
Therefore the model applies to companies processing the information as to their core business model. It generally concerns tertiary companies and not just all of them. The business needing "atoms being displaced or transformed," or real processing of matter (and not only information) are not touched. The industrial market or primary sector business is not concerned either. In the future knowledge economy, they (these industries) will still exist.
Equally, the advertisement model for Google has its limits. Can this advertising model be transposed everywhere in the information processing field? Merely speaking, can it overpass 500 billion (the amount of today's world advertising market)? The answer is, clearly, negative.
But besides these limits, Jarvis' prediction will be materialized sooner than we think. Jarvis makes us aware that we are living in exciting times...
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