John Battelle’s The Search is a fascinating read. And fascination is indeed an appropriate word to describe the topic that the author chose to explore and the company he chose to feature. Web searches continue to be a leading trend in digital technology so Google, with its impressive global market share, is a perfect example to study. So at the risk of sounding naive — or worse, biased — I must reveal my true belief: Google rocks! Why? Because a company that can poke fun of itself, dare to take risks and be different, and still laugh all the way to the bank must be doing something right.
Despite being highly criticized for its business style and corporate practices, Google still manages to incite curiosity and make corporations take a closer look at themselves and ask some basic existential questions. One of them is: How important is rapid adoption of new technologies and foresight in business management for a company to stay afloat in the digital age and ultimately succeed? Judging by what Google has been doing since it first came on the scene, both seem equally important.
One other positive to come out of Google is, of course, its super-smart search index innovation that has propelled an arms race that is poised to continue benefiting consumers and corporations alike. If engineers’ claim that search (as we know it) is only 5 percent solved at best, I join Battelle in believing that the best days are certainly ahead of us. And that’s exciting!
But that is not to say that Google is perfect or that it holds all the answers. PageRank, Google’s flagship algorithm creation, is owned by Stanford University. Although it’s licensed exclusively to Google until 2011, one can’t help but wonder what will happen to Google in just a few short years. For a company that marches to the beat of its own drum, that may prove to be a big challenge to overcome.
Along the same lines, Google’s rather lax customer service may end up hurting its own bottom line. In an age of personalized Web tools and services, it’s just plain common sense that consumers want and expect high levels of customer service communication. Ignoring customers is a serious problem that Google needs to fix sooner than later if it expects to continue receiving the type of support that it has received up until now. And that also applies to its beta-testing efforts. Google’s Orkut, for instance, is a product that has been largely ignored for years by its developers. Even though it has a huge number of users worldwide (a great majority of them from Brazil, for some strange reason), Orkut has several problems and technical support for it is lacking at best.
Finally, Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin should keep in mind that while it’s OK to keep doing what they are doing and believing that the modern culture presumption that there’s only one way to do the right thing is ridiculous, people still do respond well to those who play well.
