What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [90]
One doesn’t think of Google as a customer-service company. Its stuff just works. I rarely hear people complain about them as we do about phone and cable companies. After I told Doc Searls, another coauthor of The Cluetrain Manifesto, about my book, he blogged about his customer-service experience with Google. He needed to register a domain and if you’ve ever done that—at Network Solutions, GoDaddy, or other sites—you know that it can be a cluttered maze of attempts to get you to forget to click on boxes so you get charged for extra services. (It’s a variation on an old sales trick: When I worked at Ponderosa Steak House as a teen, we were taught to raise a ladle of canned mushroom gravy over a diner’s steak and ask, as if “no” were not an option, “Mushroom sauce?”) “Without exception, my experience with domain name registrars has been an upstream slog against a torrent of promotional distractions,” Searls wrote. “Nobody hates white space more than a domain-name registrar.” But when he discovered that Google offered this service for $10, he used it and in minutes, was done. “I used Google because I trust them not to treat me like cattle—or worse, as a potential sucker…. I bought this domain name from Google because I have a mutually respectful relationship with them. That relationship does not require human involvement, but it does require human values. Especially respect.”
GT&T would make a compact with customers to provide reliable service. When it fails, we could use Google’s own tools against it. We could put up a Google map that we all fill in when we have trouble with our cable. We could record our conversations with customer-service people and put that and our complaints on YouTube, searchable via Google. We could share how fast our bandwidth is at every address and publish it all in a Google Docs spreadsheet. Google would know that it couldn’t fight us or win trying. Google is a platform for watching Google.
Would we ever have to wait all day for the Google cable guy to show up? No. If “cable” were wireless and worked with any device that met open standards, there’d be nothing to string to our homes, nothing to install, nothing to come fix. We could choose to use our bandwidth just as we wanted, as we use our power and water at will. I want a cable company that follows Jarvis’ First Law. Wouldn’t that be novel: control in customers’ hands?
How would GT&T profit? How else? Advertising. It might still have to charge us for bandwidth and services. But Google would be smart enough to create new means to target local and national ads to us, using that revenue to subsidize the service so it would cost us less and we would use it more. Thus GT&T would make yet more money: a virtuous economic circle. Bandwidth could be free if what we do with it has enough value.
I wish Google would change its mind and get into the cable and phone business. But if it doesn’t, there’s no reason our cable torturers should not operate as I’ve outlined. You don’t need to be Google to act like Google.
Manufacturing
The Googlemobile
Google Cola
The Googlemobile: From secrecy to sharing
I sat with carmakers some time ago and suggested what I feared was blasphemy: I urged them to open up their design process and make it both transparent and collaborative. Car companies have no good way to listen to customers’ ideas. If they had, years before, I would have been among the legions who’d have gladly told them they should invest 39 cents in a plug for car radios so we could connect our iPods. Every time I try to listen to podcasts in the car via various kludges—FM transmitters that couldn’t transmit an inch away and cassette-tape gizmos (if you still have a cassette deck) that are loud and unreliable—I curse car companies and their suppliers. At least let us help design the radios you install, I urged.
My plea