What Would Google Do?: Reverse-Engineering the Fastest Growing Company in the History of the World [Paperback]

Jeff Jarvis (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 20, 2011

“Eye-opening, thought-provoking, and enlightening.”
—USA Today

“An indispensable guide to the business logic of the networked era.”
—Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody

“A stimulating exercise in thinking really, really big.”
—San Jose Mercury News

What Would Google Do? is an indispensable manual for survival and success in today’s internet-driven marketplace. By “reverse engineering the fastest growing company in the history of the world,” author Jeff Jarvis, proprietor of Buzzmachine.com, one of the Web’s most widely respected media blogs, offers indispensible strategies for solving the toughest new problems facing businesses today. With a new afterword from the author, What Would Google Do? is the business book that every leader or potential leader in every industry must read.

Editorial Reviews

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: HarperBusiness; Reprint edition (September 20, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061709697
• ISBN-13: 978-0061709692
• Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.8 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (145 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #237,320 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

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.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

115 of 129 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Are you doing what Google does? January 22, 2009

By Kathleen San Martino TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

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.

77 of 88 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Just Another Business Book (JABB), but this time, about Google February 2, 2009

By J. Marsano VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

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.

98 of 119 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars I think the crux of the book is summed up at page 47. What would Google do? Well, just get lucky, very lucky. January 23, 2009

By Jeff Lippincott VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

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.