Google is an avalanche and it has only just begun to tumble down the mountain.
The world wide web is an amazing phenomena in the way that religion is a phenomena. You may love it, you may hate it or you may be somewhere inbetween. Regardless where you are in that spectrum it is here and like religion it is powerful so we might as well try to learn about it. At first I thought this book was going to be about as exciting as the manual that used to come in the box with a new computer but it's way more interesting than a manual or a reference book. It explains how Google became so powerful then gives you the basic steps for using Google or some of the other Platforms to improve your business, (if you have or want to have a business). The key is the distribution that you can achieve through the platform Google. Platform and Distribution are the two key words in the book. I think it was because I had read the book The Facebook Effect that I found this book useful. Seeing how Facebook evolved helped me to follow the ideas presented in What Would Google Do? And believe me there are a gazillion ideas in this book. Because its copyright date is 2009, some of the predictions made are now old hat. Like being able to put more time on your parking meter by using your telephone. Makes we wonder if parking meters and one day even coins will be extinct. Jeff Jarvis has written a guide book to the internet that I found intriguing. What has Google Done? It has brought simplicity, openness, a respect for the small and it brought us the G Generation. From my experience as a teacher and a grandmother I see that it has literally brought a world of knowledge to our livingrooms. I wish that my father had been alive to use Google. He used to spend his spare time researching at the local library using tiny roles of microfiche. Computers Internet, Business Investing It may be unfair to give this book a rating since I couldn't finish it. For all I know, my complaints were resolved in the second half. So with that in mind...
It was interesting to read this book soon after a reread of Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, as both are recent offerings by major publishers on our changing internet culture. However the strengths of Shirky's book and the faults in this one can be traced, I believe, to the two men's backgrounds. Shirky has been a professor at NYU for about six years, and writes as an academic approaching a mass audience. Shirky's book is dutifully chockablock with interviews, statistics, and endnotes. Jarvis is one of the founders of Entertainment Weekly and, later, the blogger behind Buzzmachine.com and internet case study Dell Hell (mentioned in both books). He's coming from writing for a mass audience to, well, writing for a mass audience. But he's coming from writing blog entries to composing a book. Herein lies the problem.
While on paper the thesis is intriguing--Since Google is now one of the world's biggest companies, what if we applied their practices and ethos to other industries?--the execution lacks any evidence of sustained research or in-depth interviews. What we have then is the author's preliminary conceptions of Google repeated ad nauseum, without challenge or expansion, over the course of the book. As he takes on different industries, such as transportation or, yes, publishing, he jumps to pie-in-the-sky proposals with anecdotal evidence for justification: his prescription for the airline industry is to mimic RyanAir's wishes to make tickets free in exchange for revenues earned via in-flight gambling. The author seems to believe that we will agree with his arguments purely on the basis that they exist instead of the usual persuasions of rhetoric.
I'm very interested in what the critical reception to the book will be, especially from other tech journalists and bloggers. Even in my department at work (online marketing in publishing), this book has been defended and excoriated in equal measure. Computers Internet, Business Investing There's this example What Would Google Do? where Jarvis talks about how newspapers could respond to Huffington Post setting up a new blogging venture in Chicago. He basically says that they should become their new best friend - forget that they are competition and think long term. They'd get more out of magnanimity than being territorial.
But, he concludes, it doesn't matter because news organizations don't yet think that way. The thing is, no one does. People, like Marcus Aurelius said, are meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. We shouldn't be surprised when they act that way.
The benefits of being open minded, collaborative, honest, and helpful are not new. We've been extolling those virtues since Aesop. Or on Google's business end, being scalable, keeping overhead low, treating your customers like partners, pocketing less value than you create. Those are the basic, bedrock fundamentals of business.
My point is that we already know all that stuff is good. Awareness isn't the problem. Children know that you shouldn't be evil. We don't need to praise it anymore. What we should be discussing is how to practice it.
The book itself falls into the gap between knowing and doing. Jeff misses a very teachable lesson at the juncture where he is mature enough to admit that it's sort of contradictory to take the most old school way of publishing his idea - advance from a major publishing house, syndicate part of the book in a magazine right at the release date, etc. His words: Sorry. Dogs got to eat.
Right. Welcome to reality. Where we all live. Where some entertainment companies would probably do innovative things but are tied to crazy artists. Or, companies controlled by petty bosses or signed leases or long term contracts or institutional inertia. The problem isn't that they haven't asked the right rhetorical question. If doing what Google does was easy, they'd have already done it. Since it's hard, they haven't.
This book and books like it lack concreteness. What would Google do is a great question. It's a wonderful title for a book. But it's not well served by 250 pages of proof that it's the right one to ask. We know this. Our collective wisdom knows this.
So what specifically makes Google able to ignore the barriers that trip other people up? How do they keep the instinct to be surly, meddling, dishonest and jealous from taking over? How can people put the brakes on a direction they know is conflict with their long term goals? In other words, we're trying to solve organizational problem with psychological treatments and it's never going to work. WWGD? has all sort of great examples of good - as in not evil - decisions that Google and other companies have made. What is doesn't have is much introspection as to how they fought the resistance towards making it.
I'd really like to read a book that doesn't think the solution lies in more talking. If you were to suggest one of the ideas in the book where you work nobody would tell you it was stupid - they'd just say it's not realistic. THAT is where we need pages. Not to say Jeff's book isn't good (it is), it's just not what it could be. It's lame to treat all this as some revelation because it's not. It should be a starting off point. Computers Internet, Business Investing This is a great book, don't get me wrong I have no clue why I started reading this book in 2013 and just finished it now in 2019, 6 years later.
On the contrary, I wish I would have read it in 2009 when it was published and used in my work since then and maybe even invested in Google back then.
What strikes me however is how valid this book still is and how it connects with many other books I have read during 2019 or is currently reading.
Jarvis goes through many different areas and sectors and tries to explain how these sectors would look if they were run by Google. It's a fascinating read. The section about climate is very telling. Most people talking about climate like Greta Thunberg or Al Gore attack it from the perspective of regulations, Google attacks it from the perspective of innovation and investments. Instead of raising the cost of pollution, lower the cost of renewable energy. Greta and Al talk about what we shouldn't do and Google talks about what we can do. It's the contrast I guess between an activist and an engineer.
The sentence that resonated the most with me is the following in the chapter about education Google U: Opening education
We need to separate youth from education. Education lasts forever. Youth is the time for exploration, maturation and socialization.
Computers Internet, Business Investing How would Google run the world? How would everything look if every industry, every social activity was googley?
Everything would be more open, collaborative and fun, that is how. The book might be masked as an exploration of a successful way of doing things, but in reality it a call for the open-source gift economy in which everyone participates to create great value. It makes sense too, for much of it.
Apple posed some problems for the author though. Apparently non-open-source can also work spectacularly.
In any case, let us try out this world. It seems like a a good place to take risks. Computers Internet, Business Investing
İtiraf ediyorum: Ben bir riyakarım. Eğer kendi kurallarıma uymuş olsaydım, bu kitabı şu anda okumuyor olacaktınız, en azından bir kitap olarak. Onu linkler ve aramalar aracılığıyla bulup online’da ve ücretsiz okuyor olacaktınız. Siz bu kitapta yapmış olduğum hataları düzeltebiliyor olacaktınız ve ben Google ile ilgili son istatistikleri kitaba ekleyerek onu güncelleyebiliyor olacaktım. Bu kitaptaki fikirler etrafında bir diyalog başlatabilecektik. Bu proje, blogumun okurları sayesinde şu anda olduğundan çok daha fazla işbirliği üzerine kurulu olabilecekti. Hatta Facebook’ta bir Google düşünürleri grubu kurabile-cektik ve böylece sizler daha çok deneyiminizi, daha iyi tavsiyelerinizi ve benim burada tek başıma düşünebileceğimden çok daha farklı bakış açılarınızı benimle paylaşabilecektiniz. Yayınevinin verdiği avansı almamış olacaktım fakat danışmanlıktan ve konferanslardan para kazanabiliyor olabilecektim. Fakat yayınevinin verdiği avansı aldım. İşte bu nedenle şu anda bu çalışmayı bir kitap halinde okuyorsunuz. Üzgünüm. Karnımı doyurmam lazımdı. Gazetelere baskı makinelerini kapatmayı tavsiye ettiğim gibi, kitap yayıncılığına da bir tavsiyem var: Kitapları kurtarmak için onları yok etmeliyiz. Kitapların esas sorunu onları çok sevmemiz.
Bu satırları okurken enayi yerine konduğuma mı sinirleneyim, yazarın çelişkisine mi bilemedim... Zaman kaybı, bildiğimiz basit şeylerin uzatılarak yazılmış versiyonu...
UZAK DURUN Computers Internet, Business Investing I will use this book in my future entrepreneurial journalism course, and possibly social media as well - which is saying a lot, because I rarely add new required texts.
If you read Jarvis' blog/follow him on Twitter etc. and are generally well-read when it comes to digital disruption, there isn't much new here - but it's still an excellent, clear summary of the way not just Google but social media and the web more generally are changing many industries, including journalism, media, and education. I think it will be particularly useful for introducing students to these concepts, much like Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody.
Some of his critics say Jarvis pushes his argument too far, is too wholeheartedly a Google fanboy - but to that I say...yeah, but so what? I think we need some of that in a world in which far too many people are exactly the opposite - STILL unwilling to see the change smacking them in the face. You don't have to agree with every word to believe that books like these and Shirky's serve a very useful purpose. We need our evangelists for the new age.
The one part I struggle with is with the Googlification of education. I am all for disruption in education in principle, and I wholeheartedly agree that even if I wasn't, tough luck - it's coming. But my experience as an educator who works with a lot of non-elite, first generation college students is such that we have a long way to go to marshal the forces of the web and disruption to provide greater access to high quality education to all. Why? Because we can Googlfy education and learning more easily that we can Googlfy motivation and grit, and at the end of the day, no learning goes on without those two things. Maybe motivation and grit will flower in an era of greater abundance, but I worry.
I like his point that most of our education system is still too highly focused on conformity and memorization; and that maybe that push for sameness that saturates the entire system is what turns kids off to learning - by the time I get them in college, maybe it is all but too late. I love this quote:
There is an abundance of talent and a limitless will to create, but they have been tamped down by an educational system that rewarded only a few against, and discouraged by a critical system that anointed a closed creative class.
Yes. But. I teach classes in which there are never quizzes or tests (no memorization - who needs it in a Google age?) and creativity and innovation are encouraged, even demanded - we build things and make stuff. We play with new social media tools, make cool multimedia projects on topics entirely of their choice, and/or we build media startups. And I have some success with that - but frankly it is a relatively small handful of students who actively participate, even do the required work. You can bring them to the Googley classroom but you can't make all of them drink.
Computers Internet, Business Investing I can't tell you how happy I am to be done with this book. Since I cannot let a book go without finishing it, this one became an obstacle that prevented me from moving on to other books. It was so repetitive and hollow that I wanted to punch the author for wasting my time and money.
The main idea of the book is really interesting and worth delving into, because what Google does is truly great. But Jarvis shouldn't be an author, or, he shouldn't write books. I'm sure he's doing fine writing his blog and all, but the book was a pain to read. First of all, two thirds of the websites and products mentioned in the book has some ties with Jarvis, whether it's a startup he's involved with, or an institution he's been teaching. He doesn't sound very sincere, he uses the book to market things that will benefit him. He always intervenes whenever the narration gets fluent by saying (blah blah blah) is a company I invested in. The other, I'm on the board of directors. And this one is my son's company. Dude, I'm not here to listen to the list of companies you've worked for. Then the last half of the book turns out to be very unnecessary because it just repeats the first half under the pretense of interpreting the ideas into reality (which doesn't happen). The last half basically reads yada yada yada.
I'm so super glad I'm done. All of the brilliant ideas in this book, you probably know already. Computers Internet, Business Investing This might be my favorite read so far of 2009 (although I thoroughly enjoyed Outliers and Here Comes Everybody as well). I love discussing creative disruption and this book is full of that. While some of the best ideas aren't Jeff's (Umair Haque and Fred Wilson are heavy influences and mentioned repeatedly in the book) for me it didn't much matter because of the importance and timeliness of the subject matter. If you're entrepreneur you have to read this book. Computers Internet, Business Investing Although I think this book is about 50 pages too long, I still highly recommend it to anyone trying to understand modern economy and culture. I was afraid that it would be a big bowing down to Google, which I see enough of in my career. It isn't. Instead, it is a series of case studies proving how companies like Google are leading a civil movement against closed-system corporation culture.
I didn't feel like I needed this paradigm applied to so many industries. Jarvis uses the Google template to discuss real estate, insurance, public relations, law, media, journalism, and more. Towards the end it becomes slightly formulaic but it does help if you want to apply this line of thinking to your own business. For my thoughts on how it applies to my own industry, see my blog post. Computers Internet, Business Investing
Jeff Jarvis ↠ 1 DOWNLOAD
“Eye-opening, thought-provoking, and enlightening.”
—USA Today
“An indispensable guide to the business logic of the networked era.”
—Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody
“A stimulating exercise in thinking really, really big.”
—San Jose Mercury News
What Would Google Do? is an indispensable manual for survival and success in today’s internet-driven marketplace. By “reverse engineering the fastest growing company in the history of the world,” author Jeff Jarvis, proprietor of Buzzmachine.com, one of the Web’s most widely respected media blogs, offers indispensible strategies for solving the toughest new problems facing businesses today. With a new afterword from the author, What Would Google Do? is the business book that every leader or potential leader in every industry must read.
What Would Google Do?