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Product Details
Hardcover: 272 pages
Publisher: HarperBusiness; First Edition first Printing edition (January 27, 2009)
Jeff Jarvis is the proprietor of one of the Web's most popular and respected blogs about the internet and media, Buzzmachine.com. He also writes the new media column for the Guardian in London. He was named one of 100 worldwide media leaders by the World Economic Forum at Davos in 2007 and 2008, and he was the creator and founding editor of Entertainment Weekly. He is on the faculty of the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism in New York City.
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.
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86 of 98 people found the following review helpful
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.Read more ›
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19 of 20 people found the following review helpful
It never fails that the latest hot company becomes the model for how all businesses should be run. Unfortunately, Jarvis' book is no exception. He takes a down industry (U.S. car companies) and compares it with one of the company's most successful (Google). Apples and oranges. He asserts that Google's openness is the fix for the problems with automobile industry.
First, let's be clear. Google is not open by any stretch of the imagination. You can't get a 2-3 year view into their product roadmap. Google's data centers are top secret. If they're so open, why not let people tour them like Miller does its breweries or Boeing it airplane manufacturing plant? I, for one, would love to tour their facility. It'd be fascinating (geeks rule!). Second, Google doesn't implement everything its users want. GMail users have asked for custom folders to organize their email but instead get categories. Why isn't the customer's feedback taken into consideration? Every other mail provider allows for this. Lastly, their beta programs never seem to end. Beta programs, by definition, let users give feedback but they're also unsupported. "We lost your mail? Sorry, that's a beta." If the folks in Detroit rolled all of their cars off of the assembly line with a "beta" lable people could be killed. Thanks, but no thanks. Some of the cars coming from Detroit may not be award-winning but at least they are well tested and safe.
Certainly, the automobile manufacturers as well as all industries could benefit from the feedback loop that instrumentation allows. Unfortunately, they don't have the connectivity to each car that Google and other high tech companies are beneficiaries. Google knows where people click, how long they stay on a page, etc.Read more ›
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98 of 119 people found the following review helpful
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.Read more ›
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