I first came across Hal Varian while doing my MSc in eCommerce… he’s a well respected economist and academic with 100s of journal articles and books to his name. My favorite is the simple and light-weight book that he co-authored ‘Information Rules: A Guide to the Network Economy‘… which I read 3-4 years ago.
I hadn’t actually realised that he’d joined Google as their ‘Chief Economist’ until I saw this post about the Democratization of Data on the official Google Blog. It’s a far cry from an academic article but does describe how Google’s products and services contribute to the democratization of data and how it allows for a more egalitarian balance between large MNCs and tiny low-cost outfits.
This is how I’d seen Google in it’s first few years, especially with the launch of GMail, Google Docs and Blogspot… I (and I’m sure many others) thought the whole idea of Google was to help companies exist without the need to create a brand (in the traditional sense of the word), in a world and medium that introduced and accepted new voices, opinions and content.
Google’s Schmidt, however, refers to how companies with brand awareness will make the difference and help companies stand-out in the Internet cesspool. The remark was made to an audience of traditional media execs from the magazine industry… figures. Is he just presenting Google as a different entity to suit the audience? Sounds quite hypocritical to me… certainly conflicting with their Blogspot platform which half the internet must be using to contribute to this ‘cesspool’…
In the meantime, it seems Google really wants to make friends with the offline media… judging by this interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal, about how Google is being a bit more adventurous with it’s offline advertising campaigns. Moving from a cult-ish word-of-mouth PR engine in it’s fledgling days to high profile offline marketing campaigns in Japan. It’s clear we’ll be seeing more of this as it tries to shake off the notion of only being a Search Engine… and as it tries to gain market share in Asia where it’s market share is quite a long way behind Yahoo and local companies (ie. Korea and Japan).
No Comments on "Democratising the ‘cesspool’…"