Not letting any grass grow, seeing as how we are now deep in the post financial crash world. So here are some thoughts from Jeff Jarvis, who has written a book called WWGD (What Would Google Do) which is out in January. Some highlights:
* The link changes everything. We live in a hyperconnected world. If we could build this tower of bullshit in derivatives through connections, what of worth can be built? Knowledge, wisdom (about, say, medicine), new understanding of the world (through data about our behavior)? And what efficiencies can be found because we can do what we do best and link to the rest?
* Atoms are a drag. The digital economy, Google’s economy, is far more appealing. In a sense it, too, is derivative as it creates value on such intangibles as knowledge and behavior. Except unlike financial bets, Google’s metaknowledge creates real value. There’s the other side of the coin of the virtual value that is tearing us down now – a way to build assets quickly and without dependence on and the limitations of stuff.
* Small is the new big. Countless small retailers on eBay now make up a market bigger than our largest department-store chain, Federated. The long tail of culture (and the big butt to which it is attached, as Google’s Matt Cutts calls it) adds up to huge attention. Or, as I say in a law in the book, the mass market is dead; long live the mass of niches.
* Be a platform. In an economy built on networks, you want to be a platform. Google is. It enables countless businesses to run thanks to its revenue (AdSense), its content (Google Maps), its functionality, (Google Docs), its services (Google App Engine), not to mention its distribution. Amazon has become a platform for businesses, first stores and now anything. Add eBay, Glam, Skype, craigslist, PayPal. They’re platforms.
In this new world, you don’t want to own everything – indeed, if you’re like Google, you want to own as little as possible. Instead, you want to enable everything.
* Be transparent. I often say that transparency is a key ethic I learned online in blogs. This is just my symbol of it. Transparency is a system of trust and what we lack right now is trust. Transparency is the solution.
The ethic and attitude of transparency reaches into society and our lives. I say in the book that life is public now and so is business. Value is built now on being found – everybody needs a little Googlejuice – and on listening to the data our constituents create by their actions. Friendships will be maintained and built differently because of our new publicness.
* Give the people control and we will use it; don’t and you will lose us. I call this Jarvis’ First Law. It will become the law of the lands as we no longer have cause to trust our leaders in finance and business or government. We will not just demand control; the internet gives us the means to exercise it. Trust will not be restored from the top but from the bottom.
Google knows which sites we trust with our links and clicks and which are trying to spam it; eBay sets up the means for customers to anoint merchants with trust; Amazon learned that we will trust the opinions of fellow readers over reviewers; PayPal and Prosper help us to make trusted transactions. We don’t trust banks anymore; hell, they don’t trust each other.
* Don’t be evil. Why should it be surprising and rare – even amusing – that a company would make that vow as Google has? Shouldn’t it be assumed? No, it isn’t. And that’s a key to the mess we’re in: the bullshit was always someone else’s responsibility and that responsibility could always be passed on to the next and bigger fool.
Google executives say that they use their vow just to enable the question to be raised in discussions. Wouldn’t it have been wonderful if somewhere, anywhere, just one loan buyer or seller or financial institution had just asked whether knowingly buying and selling assets they now so freely describe as toxic would be evil?
Welcome to the Google economy.
Much much more at the link.
