What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [17]
Questions to ask yourself: How can you act as a platform? What can others build on top of it? How can you add value? How little value can you extract? How big can the network atop your platform grow? How can the platform get better learning from users? How can you create open standards so even competitors will use and contribute to the network and you get a share of their value? It’s time to make your own virtuous circle.
Think distributed
Most companies think centralized, and they have since the decline of the Sears catalog and the dawn of the mass market. Companies make us, the customers, come to them. They spend a fortune in marketing to attract us. We are expected to answer the siren call of advertising and trudge to their store, dealership, newsstand, or now, web site. They even think we want to come to them, that we are drawn to them, moths to the brand.
Not Google. Google thinks distributed. It comes to us whenever and however it can. Google’s search box can appear on our browser or any page anywhere on the internet. If we do go to the trouble of traveling to Google.com’s home page, we’re rewarded with nothing but its spare search box and perhaps the occasional seasonal gag adorning the logo—but no ads. CNBC’s Jim Cramer asked Google CEO Eric Schmidt in 2008 what the company could charge home-page sponsors. “Some number of billions of dollars,” Schmidt said. But Google won’t sell ads there because “people wouldn’t like it.” Yahoo and most other sites, on the other hand, try to make their home pages into destinations, crammed with content and advertising they believe will attract readers and serve marketers. Yet many users don’t see these home pages. As many as 80 percent of a day’s users at many news sites enter through search or links and never go to the home page.
Yahoo and many internet sites think of themselves as an end. Google sees itself as a means. Early in Yahoo’s life, its cofounder, Jerry Yang, told me it was his job to get users in and out of Yahoo as quickly as possible. That changed when Yahoo decided to become a media company. Its new goal was to keep people inside its fence as long as possible. Years later, I heard Yang and his lieutenants brag about the “fire hose” of traffic they could bring from their home page. Like so many sites, they think the job of the home page is to take you where they want you to go. Google sees its home page as the way to get you to where you want to go. And when you get there, there’s a good chance you’ll find a Google ad or application. That is where Google wants to be: wherever you are.
Google distributes itself. It puts its ads on millions of web pages it does not own, earning billions of dollars for those sites and for itself. It offers scores of widgets—boxes of free, constantly updated content or functionality anyone can add to a web site or desktop: everything from weather to cartoons, chat to calendars, sports scores to photos, recipes to games, quotes to coupons. These widgets are filled with other companies’ content; Google merely created the platform to distribute it. Yahoo, AOL, and other content sites should have created such distribution platforms years ago, cutting themselves up and offering their wealth of content and functionality to others to distribute and build upon. They didn’t think that way. They didn’t think distributed. They wanted to get us to come to them.
This understanding of the distributed web is what made Google buy YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006 (though Google already had a lesser video service). YouTube grew to be the standard for video by making it easy not only to upload and play videos but also to embed—that is, to distribute—those videos on any site. My business partner,