What Would Google Do?: Amazon.co.uk: Jeff Jarvis: Books

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What's the question every business should be asking itself? According to Jeff Jarvis, it's WHAT WOULD GOOGLE DO? If you're not thinking or acting like Google -- the fastest-growing company in the history of the world -- then you're not going to survive, let alone prosper, in the Internet age. An indispensable manual for survival and success that asks the most important question today's leaders, in any industry, can ask themselves: What would Google do? To demonstrate how to emulate Google, Jarvis lays out his laws of what he calls "the new Google century," including such insights as: Think Distributed Become a Platform Join the Post-Scarcity, Open-Source, Gift Economy The Middleman Has Died Your Worst Customers Are Your Best Friends and Your Best Customers Are Your Partners Do What You Do Best and Link to the Rest Get Out of the Way Make Mistakes Well ! and More He applies these principles not just to emerging technologies and the Internet, but to other industries--telecommunications, airlines, television, government, healthcare, education, journalism, and yes, book publishing--showing ultimately what the world would look like if Google ran it.The result is an astonishing, mind-opening book that will change the way readers ask questions and solve problems.

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By Jeff Jarvis

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Slightly disappointed, 23 Oct 2009

By	Maria2222 "maria2222" (London) - See all my reviews

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!

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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Is Google the "Isaac Newton's apple" of our time?, 13 Mar 2009

By	Gerry O'neill (Morrisville, NC United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)

In his excellent book, The Death of Economics The Death of Economics Paul Ormerod quotes with approval how advances in knowledge can be made by pure thought and inspiration from mundane events such as Newton being inspired by the fall of an apple from a tree. He also reflects on the paucity of economics because of it's divorce from the realities of the world.

What fascinates me about this book is how the author, Jeff jarvis combines everyday experience and observation from differing components of our present day society and combines them with the way that Google operates to develop scenarios where new developments might take place if such methods were applied to them. He utilises some novel companies features and traits to illustrate the potential of such approaches.

In an earlier review of companies changing their business modelsThe Ultimate Competitive Advantage: Secrets of Continually Developing a More Profitable Business Model a similar yet differentiated approach was shown to achieve profitable results.

This book is a judicious yet heady mixture of futurology and fact based observation about opportunities which are currently available in the world to web based entrepreneurs seeking to maximise the use of available computing power to develop new products and services that will provide consumers the things that they want and need.

More than that, this is a manifesto from a visionary of openness as much as possible. he postulates a future grounded in the present based on networks like facebook and it's clones, where individuals share their wants and desires with large numbers of people and others are able to satisfy their wants with products where price is competed to the lowest level after costs have been forced down to a minimum.

Jarvis is an advocate of a movement based on open sourced systems which does not stand for the total abolition of privacy but allows each individual to disclose what they wish to whom they wish. In a way it is that opening up which helps to generate those new ideas which may inspire others to either produce themselves or in co-operation with others. In a sense it is a fulfillment of Marx's observation that "all that is solid, melts into air".

What Would Google Do is an excellent piece of writing which is in itself almost inspirational and motivational. There is much in this for people to discuss and argue with. I am sure that not everyone will agree with all of his arguments. It is also a subversive book which, if carried though to it's conclusion in many fields, would undercut much of that which Government currently does. It would sound a death knell for much that is done in our name and could lay the vasis for smaller, more efficient, more localised, more democratic government. If, that is, the present governments at all levels would allow us to do so.

A good read, a highly enjoyable read, with great significance.

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5 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good read on Google's business model, 15 Feb 2009

By	S. Basak "sbasak" - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: What Would Google Do? (Hardcover)

I read this book in a book store! So, I did not read it line by line but glanced through the important concepts. This book basically explains how Google has changed the way industry works. You simply can't ignore effect of Google in our daily e-life. The author points out that "instant" search has made people impatient [which is not necessarily bad]. How the bad experience blogs about a company really ruin its reputation. Conversely, these blogs are indication of where the company lackings its customer skills. It also highlights why not having your business name appear through Google search make you almost invisible to outside world. It's fascinating how Google can offer so many things for free and can still make a good amount of money!

The second part of the book draws a fictitious world and discusses if most common businesses (from Coca Cola/McDonalds to GE/AT&T etc.) were owned by Google, how it would have performed.

Overall I enjoyed the book. The language is modern and lucid. There is a good flow from start to end.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars A visionary book
This is a fantastic book that really gets you thinking about not just Google but the way the internet is changing the way we live. Read more

Published 1 month ago by G. C. Watts

5.0 out of 5 stars What will Michael Do?
I'm a third of the way in and feel obliged to rate and review now. Why? Because I am quoting 'WWGoogleD' three or four times a day! Read more

Published 6 months ago by Michael Heppell

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Book
I really enjoyed this book and I have already recommended it to a few friends. Jeff Jarvis takes the Google business model and applies it to the massive changes the Internet has... Read more

Published 6 months ago by Ms. A. L. Marner

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