Google’s Secret Sauce: “
While there are many start-ups called by the media ‘Google killers‘, becoming more popular than Google is increasingly difficult. Even if Google started with an algorithm for search, it built an infrastructure that prepared its later expansion and became more important than the initial innovation. From New York Times:

Consider the question of Google’s greatest business secret. Is it the algorithms behind its search tools? Or is it the way it organizes vast clusters of computers around the globe to answer queries so quickly? Perhaps predictably, Google won’t disclose the number of computers deployed in its vast information network (though outsiders speculate that the network has at least 450,000 computers).

I believe that the physical network is Google’s ‘secret sauce,’ its premier competitive advantage. While a brilliant lone wolf can conceive of a dazzling algorithm, only a superwealthy and well-managed organization can run what is arguably the most valuable computer network on the planet. Without the computer network, Google is nothing.

Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, appears to agree. Last year he declared, ‘We believe we get tremendous competitive advantage by essentially building our own infrastructures.’

Process innovations like Google’s computer network are often invisible to the public, and impossible to duplicate by rivals. Yet successful companies realize that maintaining competitive advantage depends heavily on sustaining process innovations. Great process innovators often support basic research in relevant fields, maintain complete control over the creation of every aspect of a product and refuse to rely on outside suppliers for important components.

Google built a file system ‘for large distributed data-intensive applications’, a programming model and a distributed storage system called BigTable that works on top of Google’s file system. Hadoop, an open source project supported by Yahoo, wants to replicate Google’s distributed systems.

{ Image from Eric Schmidt’s presentation at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in April 2004. }

“

(Via Google Operating System.)

one company, ten brands: lessons from retail for tech companies: ”

Lots of folks are unaware that multiple brands are owned by the same company (e.g., the same company owns Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy). Consumer activists often complain that this practice is deceptive because it tricks consumers into believing that there are big distinctions between brands when, often, the differences are minimal. Personally, while I’d love to see more consumer brand awareness, but I think that brand distinctions play an important role. I just wish that the tech industry would figure this out.

I’m a relatively educated consumer and I’m also one of the most brand-loyal customers out there. When it comes to food and personal care products, many of my brand decisions come down to smell and taste, even when these are completely manufactured in a lab in New Jersey to differentiate soaps, toothpastes, and other products that are chemically identical. I buy All laundry detergent and not other Unilever brands (Surf, Wisk) or P&G brands (Tide, Gain, Cheer) simply because it smells better. When it comes to clothes, fit trumps everything.

In other words, my purchasing decisions are heavily affected by ‘interface.’ (Politics and convenience too…) When a company changes the interface, I get cranky. I’m still cranky with my favorite pretzel brand for eliminating the air bubbles in their pretzels that allowed for more salt to build up. The reason that I’m committed to most consumer brands is not because I love the company. For many products, I’m not even influenced by the lifestyle being sold. I simply love the interface. Luckily, most retail companies get that their interface matters and when they futz with it, they create a separate brand or segment the primary brand into ‘Original’ and ‘New with XYZ.’ In the world of retail, a brand represents its interface. There are interfaces I like, those that I don’t, and those that I’m completely ambivalent about. But the interface often matters a whole lot more than the ‘features.’

Why do technology companies often fail to understand branding the way retail folks do? Many think that they can change the interface at whim to spice-up their product. They approach user retention as user lock-in, rather than user satisfaction and commitment. They try to shove everyone into the same interface in a one-size-fits-all paradigm that tends to fit few. Why??

Unfortunately, I don’t think that many companies are aware of the limitations of their brands. When they’re flying high, their brands are invincible and extending it to a wide array of products seems natural. Yet, over time, tech companies’ brands get entrenched. Certain users identify with it; others don’t. New products using that brand enter into the market with both cachet and baggage. Yet, tech companies tend to hold onto their brands for dear life and assume users will forget. Foolish.

We all know that youth talk about certain products as ‘sooo last year.’ This tends to cover a genre rather than a brand. Yet, teens also have plenty to say about the brands themselves. Yahoo! and AOL, for example, are for old people. When I asked why they use Yahoo! Mail and AOL Instant Messaging if they’re for old people, they responded by telling me that their parents made those accounts for them. Furthermore, email is for communicating with old people and AIM is ‘so middle school’ and both are losing ground to SNS and SMS. While Microsoft is viewed in equally lame light amongst youth I spoke with, it’s at least valued as a brand for doing work. Yet, even youth who use MSN messenger think that msn.com is for old people. Why shouldn’t they? When I logged in just now, the main visual was a woman with white hair sitting on a hospital bed with the caption ’10 Vital Questions to Ask Your Doctor.’

Take a look at all of the major portals attempting to reach universal audiences. Now imagine yourself as a teen. Why would you even visit them? Even if you were the rare teen who cared about Autos, Careers & Jobs, Dating & Personals, Finance & Money, Health & Fitness, or Real Estate, one click in and you know that this content is not targeted at you. Even the sites that allow you to ‘personalize’ your modules rarely let you get rid of these or make them relevant to you. To make matters worse, now that these companies are heading towards mobile, they are taking these one-size-fits-all interfaces and cluttering up the phones. Ugg! Why?

I would like to offer two bits of advice to all of the major tech companies out there: 1) Start sub-branding; and 2) Start doing real personalization.

If you’re creating a new product, launch it with a new brand. Put your flagship brand on the bottom of the page, letting people know that this is backed by you – this is not about deception. Advertise it alongside your flagship brand if you think that’ll gain you traction. But let the new product develop a life of its own and not get flattened by a universal brand. Some products should be niche, especially those targeted at youth; while youth are happy to use well-established tools, they also like to distinguish their practices from those of adults and mature into new brands. In other words, they aren’t going to fall to your lock-in for very long. If you’re buying a well-established brand, don’t flatten it, especially if it’s loved by youth. Kudos to Google wrt YouTube; boo to Yahoo! wrt Launch. Even at the coarse demographic level, people are different; don’t treat them as a universal bunch, even if your back-end serves up the same thing to different interfaces.

Personalization is more than skinning and moving modules around. Give me a blank slate and let me add modules that might be relevant to me. Alternatively, make some good initial guesses based on what you know about me and let me modify them from the getgo. Help me find the modules that are most likely to appeal to me – you already have a lot of data on what it is that I do; use it for something that helps me. This is particularly important if there are going to be a bazillion Apps or Gadgets or Widgets out there because I don’t want to comb through the crud. A targeted interface is just as important as a targeted ad.

Above all, understand that no brand is universally loved and one size does not fit all. Most of us look like idiots in XXL shirts and we don’t want our technology interfaces to be XXL. People like brands that fit them like a glove. The tech industry serves up ads this way; why doesn’t it get this when it comes to their own brand? Technology is well positioned to create sub-brands and personalize those brands from there. It’s high time for the tech industry to grow up and start doing so.

brands
“

(Via apophenia.)

The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet: ”

When I was last in DC, I had lunch with Daniel Solove and we were talking about book publishing. He had been thinking of making his book downloadable under Creative Commons and I was like DO IT DO IT! This is the kind of book that is sooo relevant so many different audiences who would never hear about it through traditional advertising. My thought is that if it were available online, it could whet folks appetite before buying it (cuz printing it out is painful and reading it online is not wonderful either and your Kindle doesn’t support PDFs). Introducing…

This book examines the darker side of personal expression and communication online, looking at some of the social costs of what I’m always rambling on about as ‘persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences.’ Our reputation is one of our greatest assets. What happens when our own acts or the acts of others sully that? What role does the technology play in enabling or stopping that? How should the law modernize its approach to privacy and slander to address the networked world?

While this book is written by a professor, it’s written in extremely accessible manner and should be devoured by parents, marketers, technologists, teachers, HR professionals, policy makers, and anyone else who might have a stake in the world of reputation. I also found excerpts helpful for students who are trying to make sense of the costs of their practices. Oh, and it’s a fun read.

If you hate reading from the screen, just go and buy the book. The author and his publisher will thank you.

(Oh, and go Yale University Press! You’re batting well in the CC/open-access publishing baseball game!)

reputation book
“

(Via apophenia.)

‘We don’t hire editors anymore’: “

That’s the provocative headline I saw in Folio’s report from its conference and a speech by Meredith president Jack Griffin. The fuller context:

As a result, the company invested in its interactive and integrated marketing businesses—spending roughly $600 million since 2002 on launches, acquisitions and building out its existing Web sites, Griffin said, as well as redefining its editorial hiring approach. ‘We don’t hire editors anymore,’ he said. ‘We hire content strategists.’

I’m not sure what that means. But it made for a good headline.

“

(Via BuzzMachine.)

Digital Rights And The Elusive Path To Righteousness: “

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

Matthew 5:6

Kevin Kelly (executive editor of Wired) put out a brilliant write up on his blog last week entitled Better Than Free. In it, he breaks down the hard realities of traditionally copyrighted works spreading on the ‘Internet copy machine’ as he calls it. The harsh reality is undeniable: works can be copied on the Internet. And as such, they are inherently free.

Kevin then goes on to talk about intangibles that surround the consumption of copyrighted works that we are willing to pay for because these intangibles simply can’t be replicated and distributed freely. He calls these intangibles ‘generatives’ and he outlines eight of them. ‘Immediaacy’,'personalization’ and ‘findability’ provide new value that we otherwise didn’t think much of in the pre-Internet Interstate distribution days.

It’s an eye-opening article but it somehow leaves me feeling like something’s still broken and unfixable, and so we’re left scrounging for other, more ephemeral sources of value.

Can we all agree on this single premise:

Taking possession of someone else’s creative work and calling it your own is wrong.

Now I’m fully aware that in this new world of bits streaming across the wire, ‘taking possession’ is very much an outdated and loaded term, but even if we sterilize the definitions at play, the question still stands: is it wrong?

Is it wrong to come across a new band on Pitchfork, type their name into Isohunt, and within an hour or so, have that album on your hard drive and iPod? The chorus of anti-DRM advocates is strong out there. Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow comes to mind as someone who’s shed light on just how ridiculous DRM really is. How useless, futile and unduly cumbersome it is. DRM is going away. Amazon MP3 is the future and we’re all heading there.

Still, that same question lingers: is it wrong? If an artist has made clear that their work is not free, is it wrong to just take it? Is it doubly wrong to give a copy to a friend of yours?

Kevin’s article is bold because it’s acknowledging certain realities and instead looking constructively to other avenues of sustainability. For me, it still leaves some unnerving questions unanswered. Before this sea change, was the entire music distribution industry rife with false value? Was it a matter of time before they got theirs for charging us $16 for a CD? Did we buy vinyl and CD’s all these years because we didn’t have other, cheaper means to gain ‘ownership?’ In other words, were we cornered into this unfair corner of capitalism? Or did we actually believe in the system? Are we simply hostages that have been freed? Or is there something inherently wrong with how we’re behaving today?

I’m not entirely certain. Hopefully I or someone else will have a moment of enlightenment and help clarify whether we’re just a bunch of jerks stealing music or if the music industry’s party – a party where they grossly over-charged for admission – is just over.

Ok, enough questions. Anybody have some answers?

“

(Via Basement.org.)

Google Plays to Microsoft’s Weaknesses: ”

By Nat Torkington

What I love about Google’s battle with Microsoft so far is that they’ve been playing to Microsoft’s weaknesses rather than attempting to confront the colossus head-on. No Word-feature-complete attempts, instead they target the use cases where everyone runs into trouble with Microsoft products. Most recently, they’ve launched an informal collaboration version of Google Apps. The idea is to let people at a company collaborate without having to involve the IT department. Anyone who works at a company with an IT department knows why this is a good thing.

More generally, Google are tackling Microsoft by providing tools and reasons that embody ‘it’s better on the web’. Now the Border Patrol and Department of Homeland Security are helping to build that case as well. The Washington Post has an article on cellphone, cameras, and laptops being seized as people enter the US. What better reason to keep your data on the web than to avoid losing your $2,000 laptop as you pass through the passport desk?

The killer quote for me was:

‘We just access our information through the Internet,’ said Lou Brzezinski, a partner at Blaney McMurtry, a major Toronto law firm. That approach also holds risks, but ‘those are hacking risks as opposed to search risks,’ he said.

Naturally you must assume that your data stored on the web are already accessible by the fascist state police, but at least you’re not losing your laptop as well as your privacy. I’ve just finished Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother and its setting (police state California) seems more relevant with each passing day.

How long until we see a Google Apps with crypto in an un-subpoenable nation?

“

(Via O’Reilly Radar.)