Product Description

A bold and vital book that asks and answers the most urgent question of today: What Would Google Do?

In a book that's one part prophecy, one part thought experiment, one part manifesto, and one part survival manual, internet impresario and blogging pioneer Jeff Jarvis reverse-engineers Google—the fastest-growing company in history—to discover forty clear and straightforward rules to manage and live by. At the same time, he illuminates the new worldview of the internet generation: how it challenges and destroys, but also opens up vast new opportunities. His findings are counterintuitive, imaginative, practical, and above all visionary, giving readers a glimpse of how everyone and everything—from corporations to governments, nations to individuals—must evolve in the Google era.

Along the way, he looks under the hood of a car designed by its drivers, ponders a worldwide university where the students design their curriculum, envisions an airline fueled by a social network, imagines the open-source restaurant, and examines a series of industries and institutions that will soon benefit from this book's central question.

The result is an astonishing, mind-opening book that, in the end, is not about Google. It's about you.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4471 in Books
• Published on: 2009-02-01
• Released on: 2009-01-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780061709715
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
This scattered collection of rambling rants lauding Google's abilities to harness the power of the Internet Age generally misses the mark. Blog impresario Jarvis uses the company's success to trace aspects of the new customer-driven, user-generated, niche-market-oriented, customized and collaborative world. While his insights are stimulating, Jarvis's tone is acerbic and condescending; equally off-putting is his pervasive name-dropping. The book picks up in a section on media, where the author finally launches a fascinating discussion of how businesses—especially media and entertainment industries—can continue to evolve and profit by using Google's strategies. Unfortunately, Jarvis may have lost the reader by that point as his attempt to cover too many topics reads more like a series of frenzied blog posts than a manifesto for the Internet age. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Jarvis, columnist and blogger about media, presents his ideas for surviving and prospering in the Internet age, with its new set of rules for emerging technologies as well as industries such as retail, manufacturing, and service. We learn that customers are now in charge, people anywhere can find each other and join forces to support a company’s efforts or oppose them, life and business are more public, conversation has replaced marketing, and openness is the key to success. Jarvis’ other laws include being a platform (help users create products, businesses, communities, and networks of their own); hand over control to anyone; middlemen are doomed; and your worst customer is your best friend, and your best customer is your partner. Jarvis offers thought-provoking observations and valuable examples for individuals and businesses seeking to fully participate in our Internet culture and maximize the opportunities it offers. It is unclear what role Google played, if any, in the preparation of this book, which provides excellent advertising for the company. --Mary Whaley

Review
"Jeff Jarvis's What Would Google Do? is a divining rod for anyone looking for ways to hit real paydirt in the new territory of Web 2.0 marketing. Jarvis has a sharp eye for what is relevant, real, and actionable. Isn't that what we all need today?" (Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO, salesforce.com )

"[Jarvis's] observations are worth reading....We're never going to unplug the Internet, so read this book with the long view in mind. Mr. Jarvis's rules don't all apply to you, but they're all true enough for someone" (Wall Street Journal )

"Jeff Jarvis has written an indispensable guide to the business logic of the networked era, because he sees the opportunities in giving the people control, and understands the risks in letting your competitors get there first." (Clay Shirky, Author of Here Comes Everybody )

"[Jarvis] is an intelligent observer of technology and the media and has intellectual scruples.... [T]here are lessons to be learnt from Google and its single-minded determination to change how business is done." (Financial Times )

"Most of Jarvis's points-about customer influence, user-driven innovation, the death of middlemen-are by now axiomatic. And yet he manages to make the revolution feel newly revolutionary. . . . the book exudes credibility." (Inc. )

"[Jarvis's] bold thinking and prodigious faith results in a rollicking sermon on reinvention and reinvigoration." (Miami Herald )

"For those who haven't thought much about how radically, rapidly and irreversibly the Internet has empowered us and changed our culture, "What Would Google Do?" by Jeff Jarvis will be revelatory. It is a stimulating exercise in thinking really, really big. " (San Jose Mercury News )

"What Would Google Do? is an exceptional book that captures the massive changes the internet is effecting in our culture, in marketing, and in advertising." (Craig Newmark, Founder of craigslist )

"Google is not just a company, it is an entirely new way of thinking about understanding who we are and what we want. Jarvis has done something really important: extend that approach to business and culture, revealing just how revolutionary it is." (Chris Anderson, Author of The Long TailChris Anderson, author of The Long Tail )

"Jarvis, proprietor of the influential media blog BuzzMachine, gleans maxims from Google's successful strategies that occasionally sound like doublespeak (Free is a business model! Abundance is the new scarcity! Correcting yourself enhances credibility!). But they boil down to practical suggestions." (Time magazine )

"Blogger/columnist Jeff Jarvis's treatise on how-and why-companies should think and act like Google brings to mind several trite words from the world of literary criticism: eye-opening, thought-provoking and enlightening." (USA Today )

Customer Reviews

Are you doing what Google does?
Jeff Jarvits explains how Google is so successful by:

1. being free
2. acting fast
3. allowing customers to decide (thereby eliminating the third party or agent)
4. providing the most prevalent links based on their ranking ("Googlejuice")
5. etc...

The author gives numerous examples of successful companies which employ similar tactics such as etsy, craigslist, and Amazon. He describes various reasons why these tactics work.

The author certainly elaborates on enough strategies that make Google and others like Google online successes; however, the text drags on endlessly and in a somewhat unorganized fashion that I felt he was verbally vomiting. It was like reading an endless blog instead of a book. If found myself repeatedly asking these two questions:

1. What did I just read?
2. What information did I get out of reading this?

In summary, a person who is thinking of embarking on a net presence will probably find that there's enough material in this book to guide them into doing what Google does. However, since the text rambles on, that person will have to jot down important details as he or she reads in order to remember it. If the book were better organized, more concise and definitive in its evaluation of what Google and others like Google do, and had a clearer table of contents (chapter headings), I would have rated it four stars.

Just Another Business Book (JABB), but this time, about Google

What would Google do if it were writing books on business? Probably not write a book like this one. Most business books, like most Saturday Night Live skits, have a nut that's worth a couple minutes of air at most that are dragged out into an interminable pileup. To be sure, there are some interesting and illuminating ideas that Jarvis presents here, but they don't merit 200 pages.

Jarvis seeks to show how Google is the Future, but this gets lost in all his self-promotion and name dropping about his Davos luncheons. Not all of that is bad; his own struggle to get a laptop that works (and the ensuing, minor media racket he was able to generate) provide some good fodder for business and life lessons. One of which ("...your customer is your brand") is even quite profound.

But there is always a but. To get to these nuggets, you have to bushwhack through Jarvis' prose tic of coining absurd neologisms ("Googlethink", "Googlejuice", more and worse to come) and his inane triumphalism. In the introduction, Jarvis sets this tone by writing "We begin by examining the new power structure of the economy and society, where we, the people, are suddenly in charge--empowered by Google".

On the face of it alone, this notion is outrageous. Our Ourubian economy's slide is nothing less than a ratification of "old power structures" at work, regardless of where you're sitting. Even if you're at lunch with Jarvis at Davos.

Jarvis has the stuff in here to have written a short book about Google, without the silly, technorati zeal ("At Google, we are God and our data is the Bible...") and the reliance on old, worn out cliches about how Google's dominance presages "Geeks...coming to rule the culture" which constantly undercut Jarvis' allegations of "old models" being upturned. If you speak in the language of "ruling culture", after all, then you're not promoting upheaval or betterment, but just a new set of codgers at the helm. Thus, as always in a revolution: the wheel turns and you wind up exactly where you started.

You can read this book. It won't make you a better person, and it won't harm you, either.

I think the crux of the book is summed up at page 47. What would Google do? Well, just get lucky, very lucky.

I did not like this book. Yep. It's actually less than OK and I have a distinct aversion toward it. Thus, it earned a 2-star rating from me. In my humble opinion, this book is poorly organized and poorly written. In fact, even as I write this review, I have yet to figure out what organization it has. As I read it I felt like it just kept meandering and babbling with no message, no point, no content of real value.

The title of the book probably would have been just as appropriate if it has been "WWGD?" instead of the search engine optimized verion "What Would Google Do?" And if the author got paid as much as he boasts for writing this book at page 56, then the publishers really got conned. I cannot imagine this book being a bestseller. And if it ultimately is, then I have to laugh heartily at the publishing system that exists today.

The author is a trained journalist who covered New Media stories in business, then started a blog, got cozy with venture capital firms apparently, quit his journalist job, became a CUNY graduate school professor where he collects $100K a year in salary supplemented by consulting and speaking gigs that gets him another $200K a year in revenues. Nowhere in that resume is there any training in business or experience running a company. And thus, we have a self-appointed expert on business telling us about what Google would do if it were YOU. What a joke!

Google is a new media company. It is huge, very good at what it does, and what it provides is in high demand. Its business model is one that relies on revenue streams generated by advertising dollars. Newspapers, magazines, professional sports teams, film producers, and TV stations all create entertainment of some sort or another. What they do rarely creates sizeable revenue streams directly. Only the indirect revenue streams gained through advertisers support the business model. Are most companies set up like this? Can most companies bend their business models to work this way? The proper answer is: NO. And as a result, this book is a bunch of bunk.

At page 31 the author talks about "revenue models." Anybody in business knows there is no such thing. There are business models, and they have revenue streams, but streams are not models - they are just streams (or rivers in the case of Google). And at page 52 the author says "organization is a business model." No. No. No. Organization is merely a way of doing business, but it is not a business model. Business models are profit models. Revenues in must exceed expenses and costs out. And the revenue streams come from selling product, providing service, or advertising.

I think the crux of the book is summed up at page 47. What would Google do? Well, just get lucky, very lucky. 2 stars!

PS. I have read the other three book reviews previously posted for this book. I usually don't read reviews to learn anything, but since I had such a problem figuring out what the purpose of this book was I felt I would check to see if the other reviewers could help me comprehend (see the light). Unfortunately, the other reviews I found to either be babble delievered much like what was in the book - or a verification that the book was mere babble. Oh yeah, I think the book would have been better if the title were changed to "What Would Jarvis Do?" since he's the one laughing all the way to the bank. Not many people in America command $300K a year in compensation.