Jeff Jarvis Hearts Google
A few months ago I finished Jeff Jarvis’s book “What Would Google Do”. It was a fascinating read with much good insight into modern ways of running a business/organization. Google unquestionably runs a great business, but I think at the heart of Google, is an algorithm that returns better search results than any of its competitors. Yes they run their business efficiently as well, but their products superiority is what lead them to success, and leads them to try new things through iteration and openness.
Bijan Sabet recently posted a thought about building an excellent product as a pre requisite to monetization and it sort of summed up my thoughts from WWGD (What Would Google Do). Transforming every industry the way Google does things is sort of like saying being really good at something will make you better at it. Which is true, but doesn’t really mean anything if you aren’t good at that something to begin with.
Google is a child in the business world, it is only 12 years old and hasn’t even been public for 6 years. Of course its a behemoth with Billions of dollars in cash and revenue, it is no doubt a titan of the Internet Industry. But the internet is so young, we’ve had roughly 17 years with a web-browser, look at the automobile after 17 years of the combustion engine - it didn’t exist. Samuel Brown patented the internal combustion engine in 1823, 50 years in 1879 later Karl Benz patented the 2 cylinder engine used in the first automobile, which wasn’t invented for another 7 years. From 1886 when the first automobile was patented, it took until 1914 for an assembly line to build cars for the common man, and not until the 1940s was there a car that resembled autos as we know them today. So looking back at the history of our modern cars, it took about 100 years from the invention of the underlying technology until it became a useful mainstream product.
Yes we are advancing at a Moore’s Law pace, and using much more powerful technology than they were, my point is advancement takes time. Google right now is at the Model-T level, it has something great that people want and use, but in another 12 years who knows what we may be doing to find information (I don’t think we’ll be using search to find content). Google will probably be powering what ever technology it is that we use in 2022, but that is IMHO solely because its initial product was so excellent that it advanced upon its competitors so far they’ll never catch up and now any new technology that is developed anywhere on the earth, Google has the power to stick its hands in it.
Building upon that great product, Google built a great company - it wasn’t born as a great company. A great product was born around which a great company was developed, and ignoring that product would be to ignore the cornerstone of any great organization: the product that it creates.
Great companies are built around great products. Build a great product and you have a chance to create a great company.
Kudos to Mr. Jarvis for bringing a lot of great lessons to light from Google’s dominance, but my biggest lesson over the past year has been to build great products and let the rest follow. Google’s success is no exception.
