What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

Do you know Facebook is by and large the single largest Human network dreaded even by Google. Google re-invented itself into many forms and it's all because we helped them to grow. That's the power of Human network. Take any company and you will see traces of this pattern every where. Google did an extra ordinary move to give the control to US and we made a difference to this company.

But Google has many ethical questions it needs to ask itself. The Company still does not share its Ads revenue and we do not know what it does with our personal data. Some say, they make money by bumping the priority of the page rank. But yet in someway we have lot to learn from this company. In fact when Google decided to launch Google news, it did not know whether to sort by date or sort by relevance. It didn't do anything and let customers decide what they wanted. It released a beta (in fact most of the Google products remained in beta for more than 3 years :) ) and there it comes - many customers wanted them to sort by date and they flooded the company white boards with this request. You see! customers will eventually push you to their way and Google respects that feeling. It did sort the Google News by date.

We need to be a platform for our customers to resolve their issues. They will use us as a tool to achieve what they want to achieve in their business model.

Remember Dell with all its awkward customer centric services, lost market in its desktop and notebooks till Michael Dell called it a shot one day and told the employees to listen to the customers. They just did nothing more than listening to blogs, feedback and giving control to the customer to prepare their own desktops. Now Dell forms a major threat to any company who would want to enter into this market.

It's funny but true that we hold something very close to our heart (like our source code :) ) and it does nothing more than bringing our customer more pain.

"What would Google Do By Jeff" has thrown open lot of patterns which every company is going through, be it open source companies like Red Hat, mixed source like Novell and closed door like Microsoft.

The question is can we open up, give control, collaborate, provide a platform for the customer, listen to them through Google, blogs and wikies and give them what they want rather than make them to come to our home page and search for a miniscule out of an horrendous data, flashes and options in our home page.

To that extent, you can differentiate the home page of Google vs Yahoo. Open google.com, you see an editable field. Google says nothing about its company, brags nothing about its search, but it follows the customer where ever he goes. It embeds its videos, blogs, wikis, flashes, ads to to customer's home page. It makes the google map mobile; that's the power it gives to the customer.

And go to Yahoo.com, you will be lost with abundant data thrown open to already confused & frustrated customers.

While reading this book, you will be pleasantly surprised about what your Company could be. You'll be posed with questions like does it have a human side, does its existence make sense and many more intriguing yet interesting dwells.

Happy reading!