Jeff Jarvis doesn't come right out and say it, but it's pretty obvious why the former media executive, blogger and journalism professor chose to call his recent book What Would Google Do? It's safe to say that Google isn't just the flavour of the month, it's the flavour of the decade, and possibly even the century. Known only to geeks a few short years ago, it has quickly become the sine qua non of modern technology companies, a multibillion-dollar colossus that for many people is virtually synonymous with the Internet.
In his book — which the front flap refers to as "one part prophecy, one part thought experiment, one part manifesto and one part survival manual" — Jarvis says he set out to "reverse-engineer" the principles that have made Google great, and then apply those lessons to other companies and industries, from restaurants to car companies.
Despite the title, however, this book isn't really about Google at all. It's really about the Internet, and the disruptive effects that the Web in all its various forms is having on businesses and even society itself. Like so many others, it seems that Jarvis is happy to use Google as a stand-in or proxy for the Web itself.
That's not to say there isn't a lot of value in the lessons that Jarvis has for us. There's no question that a lot of companies could benefit from thinking about how the Internet has empowered consumers and effectively levelled the public-relations playing field to the point where blogs and other social-networking tools such as Twitter can change the perception of companies and their services almost overnight.
But does that have anything to do with Google? Well, yes and no.
It's true that most people find things by using Google (the company has an estimated 80 per cent market share in search). And the concept of what Jarvis calls "Google juice" — a colloquial term for the ranking system that puts some search results above others — is an important one for companies to grasp, since it means that one blogger's nasty comments about you or your product could show up more prominently on Google than the website you spent millions of dollars on (Jarvis uses himself as an example here, based on an experience he had with Dell. after he blogged about a faulty computer.)
At the same time, however, many of the principles that Jarvis ascribes to Google, as valuable as they might be, have very little to do with the company. Not only that, but in some cases Google does the exact opposite of what Jarvis advocates.
For example, he says that companies of all kinds (and even governments) need to be as open and transparent as possible. Google, however, is one of the least open or transparent companies around. It reveals as little as it possibly can about its finances, not to mention the workings of both its page-ranking system and its search-related advertising engine. Jarvis admits this, but simply glides over the contradiction.
What he really means is that being open and transparent to Google is important, in the sense that making information about your company and products freely available to the search engine is good because it makes you easy to find, and easy for people to share that information in useful ways. Google does this with many of its products, including Google Video, Google Maps and so on. It just doesn't do it with anything related to Google itself.
This is just one example of where using Google as a proxy for the ideal business or society falls apart. What Jarvis really wants to do is to sell us on the virtues of being open, honest and transparent; of companies dealing directly with their customers and listening to what they have to say; of experimentation, and "making mistakes well"; and of "managing abundance" rather than trying to artificially create scarcity. These are all valuable lessons, but not all of them are practised by Google, and not all of them stem from Google.
While Jarvis's conceit falls apart on close inspection, however, the points he is making are still worthwhile — the Internet has revolutionized (and continues to revolutionize) many aspects of business and society — and he makes them in a breezy and readable way. At one point, he calls himself a hypocrite for publishing a book rather than putting his thoughts online where they could be freely shared and interacted with in true Google style ("books are where ideas go to die," he says), but there is still much in this book worth reading.
