What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [61]
Simplicity is empowering. I don’t have to use Google the way someone else says I should, following its path of navigation. I don’t have to feel stupid looking up instructions. Google never makes me feel foolish for making mistakes (“Did you mean…?” it graciously asks when I misspell or mistype). It doesn’t waste my time trying to find what I want. It just gives me a blank box and puts the world behind it.
Design is about more than aesthetics. Design is an ethic. Design is the path by which you interact with your public. Magazines, clothes, and cars aren’t the only things that are designed. Companies are designed. Services are designed. Rules are designed. The simpler and clearer the design, the better. To be simple is to be direct. To be direct is to be honest. To be honest is to be human. To be human is to be in a conversation. To be in a conversation is to collaborate. To collaborate is to hand over control. And we are back to where we started, to Jarvis’ First Law: Give the people control and we will use it. Don’t and you will lose us. Simple.
Get out of the way
One more law from one more leader.
Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist, is a wonderful character. You’ll never meet a more unassuming revolutionary and mogul. Proudly geeky, rarely fashionable (the one time I saw him in a tie, he said he put it on just to scare people), soft-spoken, impish, and ironic, he is not what you expect, whatever that is.
Newmark confounds business people, running a service mostly for free. He charges just for job ads and real-estate ads in some cities. By various accounts, he has destroyed a few billion dollars in value in the newspaper classified business. But as I said earlier, Newmark isn’t at fault—the internet is. craigslist reveals no figures publicly, but it has been estimated that it brings in $100 million a year with just 25 employees. Still, money does not motivate Newmark and his president, Jim Buckmaster. Newmark could exploit his service for many times more income and equity. He could sell out for a fortune. He has no intention of doing either. That’s what business people don’t understand about him. He is like an alien to them (indeed, he is a bit like ALF).
Newmark introduces himself as the founder and customer service rep for craigslist. That always gets a laugh, but he doesn’t mean it as a punch line. That’s what he does: customer service. And that is the essence of craigslist’s worth. If the community becomes overrun with spammers and scammers, it will lose value for its members. So Newmark listens to their complaints and fixes problems. Craig is the cop.
When Newmark spoke to my students at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism about some of the projects he was engaged in for the public good—such as investing in the future of quality journalism—one of them asked why he didn’t sell craigslist for billions of dollars, which he certainly could, and turn his assets to philanthropy. Newmark said he believes he is helping people more by keeping money in their pockets and away from middlemen. He attributes the success of craigslist to treating his community as stakeholders, and he is paying them their internet dividend.
Newmark operates by many of the rules in this book. He created a platform and network for his communities. He trusts the wisdom of his crowd. He brings communities elegant organization. He understands that free is a business model. He relies on the gift economy. He dooms middlemen. He runs a disarmingly simple system. But then he adds his own unifying principle of technology, communities, and the internet. Here it is, with classic Craig brevity:
“Get out of the way.”
That’s it, Craig’s Law: Get out of the way. If you make a great platform that people really want to use, he argues, then the worst thing you could do is to put yourself in the middle,