What Would Google Do? [Hardcover]

In this book Jeff Jarvis attempts to dissect why Google has become the fastest growing company in the history of the planet. He studies their laws and ethos and then applies it to other industries, showing how they can `googlify' themselves for the post internet world. To many extents this book succeeds, except for a couple of major failings.

I regularly listen to Jeff on Leo Laporte's Twit (This Week in Tech) network which is worth seeking out if you're not aware of it, where he shows he is the right author for this book. He has years of experience in the entertainment and internet industry and has a deep understanding of Google's methods.

I had high hopes for this title, that I would walk away enlightened, with new business ideas. I did. However I'm not as sure of them as I perhaps should be. You see Jeff explains why `everything should be searchable and linkable', why `you can't beat free', why `atoms are the old method, internet is the new'. So why is Jeff publishing this as a book, not a free, advert supported eBook or a website? Money, that's why. He says it himself in the book. So if you can't practice what you preach (and it's very preachy), why should I believe your other advice Jeff? Is your book not available free online because that method doesn't work? Because it isn't viable?

Jeff talks about web content and how the mass of niches will beat the old system - being able to find what you want rather than being told. Which is accurate, but he largely ignores the argument of quality over quantity, that the mass of niches will only work if great content is produced and wins out. For the most part he ignores that the reason Google succeeds is because they make great quality products for free. How many people can afford to do that? Not Jeff, he's got my money.

Lastly, he talks about the power of the masses, the bloggers, how customer services (CS) is everything. How a company should spend it's money on CS, not advertising, let your fans be your adverts. Fine point. But if that happened, Google, who's revenue stream is advertising, would die a horrible death.

There is much to like about this book. It really does give a good snapshot of how marketing and the internet is changing and should be read by every CEO to understand the power great products and good customer service. Just don't expect it to change your business models, yet.

The title of Jeff Jarvis's What Would Google Do? book is a deliberate echo of the American phrase, "What would Jesus do?" Whilst for Christians asking what Jesus would do in particular situations makes sense, does Google have a similar role of authority over everyone's business lives for Jeff Jarvis's question to make sense?

At first, it may appear that the answer is obvious. Google is hugely successful. Google is very different from many companies that have gone before. Lots of firms talk about wanting to be the next Google. Google makes lots of money. Google has lots of users. And so on. So surely trying to learn from Google makes sense?

But probe into that question more deeply and the situation is rather more complicated.

First, there's the traditional outlier issue. Google is unusually large and profitable. So is it a rare exception from which the rest of us therefore cannot learn that much or is it really the path-breaker for the rest of us to follow?

Second, there's the question of permanence. There have been many firms who have briefly been top of the pile, widely admired and the focus of numerous books telling people how to be like them. In the computing and internet area, there have been several waves with the previous dominant companies usually disappearing from the scene. Microsoft is highly unusual in having stayed on top for so long. IBM and Apple both soared and crashed and soared again. All three in their different ways have stood the test of time, whilst Google is sitll a relative newbie. So if you want to learn lessons for the future, why not turn to Microsoft, IBM and Apple instead or at least in addition to Google?

Therein lie both the best and the most frustrating aspects of Jeff Jarvis's book. To his credit, the book acknowledges the existence of firms such as Apple which are highly successful and don't follow the Google route. As Jarvis himself says of Apple:

"Apple flouts Jarvis' First Law. Hand over control to the customer? You must be joking. Steve Jobs controls all ... Apple is the opposite of collaborative ... The company could not be more one-way and less transparent."

And so on. Many books full of breathless excitement about the future overlook even the really obvious counter examples. To Jarvis' credit he doesn't, but what makes the book frustrating it that he both only considers a very narrow range of exceptions and then also largely dismisses them as one-off exceptions. Look again though at the Fortune 500. Those "exceptions" are actually dominant when it comes to running successful large businesses. It is Google that is much more the exception.

He himself admits - in an eminently likable way - that it's not all about doing things like Google:

"I confess: I'm a hypocrite. If I had followed my own rules - if I had eaten my own dog food - you wouldn't be reading this book right now, at least not as a book. You'd be reading it online, for free, having discovered it via links and search. You'd be able to correct me, and I'd be able to update this book with the latest amazing stats about Google ... But I did have to make money from a publisher's advance. That is why you are reading this as a book. Sorry."

Where the book works best is where Jeff Jarvis makes points that aren't just followed by Google, but by an increasing number of other large firms, as with the idea of thinking distributed: get your content or your service out in front of people in as many different places and formats and via as many different routes as possible. It's not just Google whose audience is far more than simply the people who come to the main website.

Google is also rather less saintly that Jarvis paints it. He's lucky that his experience of Google is that, "Its stuff just works. I rarely hear people complain about them". Take a look at the streams of complaint online from people who have had problem with Google's services such as Blogger and been unable to get a response and you will see that the story is much more mixed.

The book has many good points, including the first hand account of how Jeff Jarvis fell out with Dell, laid into them online and so triggered one of the most frequently quoted case studies as the incident revolutionised Dell's approach to online engagement. Not bad at all for one unhappy customer.

It also picks up many persuasive examples of how the Google way of doing things could change other sectors, such as the restaurant one. Imagine a restaurant where on the menu you could see what other diners though of different dishes and which bottles of wine they chose to go with the main course you're going to have. Imagine the immediate benefits for the restaurant in terms of knowing which dishes work and which don't, and the attraction for diners of a richer - but useful - set of information. Then get more adventurous and imagine letting people suggest changes to the recipes and have social networks develop amongst diners to keep them coming back.

So whilst I'm dubious about the underlying premise of the book, there are plenty of individual examples and colour in to make What Would Google Do? a lively read likely to stimulate many ideas.

Let me start off with stressing that I think this is an interesting book and I'm very happy to have read it. There are undoubtedly some great and even necessary observations on customer relations, business strategies etc. for the current market; We should think distributed instead of central, listen to the customers instead of claiming to be all-knowing, accept that customers have a free will and do not like to be categorised and mass-marketed, be a platform others can build upon, not underestimate the power of the individual and their relations, realise that the middleman's days are over and that stuff sucks etc. - all good and - for the most part - pretty sound advice and something many business owners could do with learning.

BUT I also think there are some problems with the book:

1/ I don't actually feel I know more about Google the company after reading it. Yes, I know how successful, huge, popular, innovative, brave, etc. it is and the fantastic products it has either launched or purchased and allowed people to develop to become the mastodont it now is and I have the greatest respect for that and I absolutely love some of their products, but when Jeff Jarvis talks about how companies should be transparent to their customers/users, does that really apply to Google? There are a lot of questions I am sure people would like to ask the company and which are not answered here - e.g. what exactly does Google do/intend to do with the information it gathers about its users? We put a lot of trust in one organisation to handle all this information with care and without doing evil.

2/ I am not comfortable with the author being so obviously pro Google and rather uncritical in some (many) of his statements. And I can't help but think that Google's way is not really that easily adaptable for other - smaller - businesses. Actually the fact that Jarvis himself has chosen to have the book published instead of giving it away for free on his blog is a case against "Free" as a business strategy or even the "death of the middleman" in the sense that he uses an agent to get a better deal. He admits to as much in the book, but that doesn't stop him from going on and on about how Google's strategies could and should work for everybody. As to stuff - well, I kind of think stuff is necessary, but I do see the point he is trying to make.

3/ As I mentioned earlier, he makes good sense a lot of the time and it IS an interesting read whether you agree or not, so I didn't want to miss out by not finishing the book, but it took me a while - it was structured almost like a collection of blogs rather than a coherent book which makes for some repetition and breaks the flow. Another thing is the constant mentioning of interesting sites. This is actually a good thing, but I kept wanting to look up the sites mentioned and this of course didn't do much for the reading flow!

4/ He spends much time emphasizing how users think as individuals, want to be treated as such and how the companies need to listen to the users and that this in part is a result of Google-world. It might be so, but don't we also run a risk of giving rise to an even higher degree of homogenization than the branding of yesteryear if everybody uses the same platform to develop their programs and uses the same search machines to get the answers to their questions. In order to gain that individuality, I would think that the users need to be pretty media/Internet savvy and have the time to spend on doing the required research - I think that maybe he has to remember that not everybody is a superuser like him and therefore there will still be room for more traditional businesses - at least for now!

Before I finish, I just want to extend a big thank you to Google for their maps - I would never have found the Meetup yesterday without it!