What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [122]
So then Apple is the ultimate unGoogle. Right?
Not so fast. When I put that notion to Rishad Tobaccowala, he disagreed and said that Apple and Google, at their cores, are quite alike.
“They have a very good idea of what people want,” he said. Jobs’ “taste engine” makes sure of that. Both companies create platforms that others can build upon—whether they are start-ups making iPod cases and iPhone apps or entertainment companies finding new strategies and networks for distribution in iTunes.
Apple, like Google, also knows how to attract, retain, and energize talent. “Apple people believe they are even better than Google people,” he said. “They’re cooler.”
Apple’s products, like Google’s, are designed simply, but Tobaccowala said Apple does Google one better: “They define beauty as sex,” he said.
Apple understands the power of networks. Its successful products are all about connecting. Apple, like Google, keeps its focus unrelentingly on the user, the customer—us—and not on itself and its industry. And I’ll add that, of course, both companies make the best products. They are fanatical about quality.
But Tobaccowala said that what makes these two companies most alike is that—like any great brand—they answer one strong desire: “People want to be like God.” Google search grants omniscience and Google Earth, with its heavenly perch, gives us God’s worldview. Apple packages the world inside objects of Zen beauty. Both, Tobaccowala said, “give me Godlike power.” WWGD? indeed.
Generation G
Google is changing our societies, our lives, our relationships, our worldviews, probably even our brains in ways we can only begin to calculate.
Start with our relationships. I believe young people today—Generation Google—will have an evolving understanding and experience of friendship as the internet will not let them lose touch with the people in their lives. Google will keep them connected. Admit it: You’ve searched for old girlfriends and boyfriends on Google (and wondered whether they’ve Googled you). Your ability to find those old, familiar faces likely drops in inverse proportion to age: The older you are, the harder it is to find old friends online. I went to Google—purely as an academic and technical exercise, understand—and searched for old girlfriends. I found my college girlfriend, now a philosophy professor. I couldn’t find my high-school sweetheart as she had left no visible Google tracks. But she later found me because, with my blog, I had left as many tracks as a herd of buffalo in snow. We live on opposite coasts now but when I was in her city on business, we got together and filled each other in on the last—gulp—30-odd years. We never would have had that chance to catch up and come to account without Google. Thank you, Google.
That won’t be the experience of young people today. Thanks to our connection machine, they will stay linked, likely for the rest of their lives. With their blogs, MySpace pages, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Seesmic conversations, Twitter feeds, and all the means for sharing their lives yet to be invented, they will leave lifelong Google tracks that will make it easier to find them. Alloy, a marketing firm, reported in 2007 that 96 percent of U.S. teens and tweens used social networks—they are essentially universal—and so even if one tie is severed, young people will still be linked to friends of friends via another, never more than a degree or two apart.
I believe this lasting connectedness can improve the nature of friendship and how we treat each other. It will no longer be easy to escape our pasts, to act like cads and run away. More threads will tie more of us together