What would Google do?, by Jeff Jarvis, published by Collins

I hesitate to review a book that I haven’t fully read but in this case I propose to do so. (It is possible to review a book in these circumstances; Evelyn Waugh was once asked why he gave such favourable book reviews for his friends’ books and he replied 'it’s better than reading them!')

I made this selection because it is the sort of book about the modern digital age that I ought to be reading but it is heavy going and I ended up skipping much of the second half, as it became rather repetitive; so often it seems that authors are trying to make the 200 page mark rather than writing only what is necessary.

Nevertheless it is a valuable read with lots of new insights and some explanations of trends that you can see taking place every day of the week. The author is a leading blogger and an obvious extreme fan of Google and he makes no secret of this. His basic theme is that, if you want to look at future trends in a particular business, you should think about the way in which Google would run it; for example, if Google ran a restaurant, the menu would be electronic and you would be able to search for number of past users of each dish, and the responses etc.

Though this theme becomes a little boring and repetitive, it does provide the basis for Jarvis to provide some real insights for a relative dinosaur in these areas like me; here’s a selection:

• Far from discouraging customers from posting complaints on the net, companies should encourage this and make it interactive (he quotes Dell as an example of a company that has transformed its image in this way)
• Conventional advertising will soon be a thing of the past, it’s now about harnessing blogs and twitters and making yourself ‘searchable’
• Google is commodotising everything and it is only the niche players who understand the Internet – who ‘get it’ - that will survive
• Any company in a ‘middleman’ role is doomed to failure as freedom of access and information increases
• Companies who try to stifle information and open exchange of data will always end up losing; he contrasts EMI’s attempts to stop illegal downloading of music with Apple’s strategy of embracing it as a strategic opportunity

Interestingly he quotes Apple as an example of a company who has in other ways broken the mould by not being open to complaints and not encouraging ‘bottom up’ interactivity. His explanation is that Apple is just so good that it can make strategies work that others cannot.

The book ends with an interesting debate about the extent to which ‘Googling’ is replacing reading as the main source of knowledge. He quotes a number of ‘old fashioned’ thinkers who still believe that the book is here to stay, that it encourages long periods of study and thus deep thinking. Jarvis favours the more ‘modern’ view that learning is better if it is focussed and takes place in short bursts.

My view is that this is a false dichotomy anyway, that it is not ‘either/or’. There will be people and topics that suit one approach or the other but most of us will happily embrace the best of both worlds.