Here’s video from the Aspen Ideas Festival responding to my question about what follows the industrial age. It’s much better than my limited report on it below:
More of Kai Ryssdal’s very good interview with Schmidt here.
Posts Tagged ‘wwgd’
Eric Schmidt on the new world
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009Google on Google
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009At the Aspen Ideas Festival, I got up to a mic to ask Eric Schmidt a question. No, it wasn’t, “what would Google do?” I wanted his reaction to a notion I’ve talked about here that has crystallized since I wrote the book: that we are going through something more than a financial crisis and more profound and permanent than a recession. We are shifting from the industrial era – and the age of mass production, distribution, marketing, and media – to what follows, a society built on knowledge and abundance. We are seeing the collapse of the auto, banking, and newspaper industries and large swaths of the the rest of media, retail, real estate, and others to follow. We’re not going to go back; the change is bigger and more fundamental than that. “Did I go too far?” I asked.
“Yes,” Schmidt said. “But you’re good at that.” He had been asked earlier how he felt about people constantly asking what Google could and would do about this problem or that. At that moment, he pointed to me and said that What Would Google Do? did that; it took the Google model and extended it. If Google is a metaphor for thinking differently, I am happy to be it,” he said and then demurred, “Google is a simple company.”
Then Schmidt reacted to my question and this is what’s fascinating to me: He said he wished I were right. He said that too much of our resource, people, government help and attention, measurement go to the legacy players, the big, old companies. He wishes that weren’t the case. He wants that change but fears we will return to old reflex. Innovation, he said, happens at small start-ups but they don’t get the resource and attention.
I asked whether Google could be Google only because it was new. He said it was because it worked in the open internet.
He told about being an engineer before Google and seeing whole businesses start because of a regulatory porthole in telecom called the T-1, the 1.5 meg line that wasn’t regulated like the rest of communication. If that ceiling hadn’t been there, he argued, our development of digital would have sped ahead by five years.
So I’m thinking about that: My view of the coming world order may be more a manifesto than a prediction. Hmmmm.
Here are some of my tweets and notes from Schmidt’s Q&A:
* Asked how he reacted on THAT day in September, Schmidt says, “I was scared.” Google took its cash out of banks to sovereign nations’ currencies
* He says he still doesn’t understand how we got into the financial mess: “the failure of information that got us to this point.”
* On recovery: “We’re on schedule. Because the people who got us into this told us that.”
* He reminds US that Google was not part of finance. “Had we been doing it we might have been measuring where all the money was.”
* “We already had our bubble… We had a great time. Next time, I’m going to sell at the peak.” He’s doing great stand-up.
* Asked whether we can innovate out of a recession, Schmidt said “recessions end on their own & politicians love to take credit.”
* Schmidt says the ups and downs will be amplified because there is more information.
* “You do not want the government to own your company… In many cases, they will turn out to be jobs programs.”
* He says simply that he hopes people will more likely say this (house inflation, Iceland’s economy) just “doesn’t make sense”
* Q: You guys are everywhere. Schmidt: “That is our goal.”
* “I learned awhile ago that the right way to run human systems is transparency.” Problems came from information hiding.
* Brian Lehrer asks schmidt where Google is so bit it needs to be regulated as a public utility. A: “no”
* I don’t know how to solve newspapers generic problem. He says they are working on products in this arena. (No more details.)
* “The internet is a great friend to small businesses.” He says Google does not favor big businesses and big businesses don’t like that. [I say: See news.]
* Asked abot Froogle, he says, “Why did you remind me.” Why didn’t it work? “It didin’t work because it just didn’t work. We celebrate our failure in the company because we want people to take risks.” [Me: There's the beta corporation.]
* “We love advertising.” 97 percent of Google’s revenue is advertising. “No, we love advertising revenue.” He said his board is looking for more legs to the stool and Schmidt says they do have other streams coming.
The need for – and risks of – government transparency
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009At yesterday’s Personal Democracy Forum – where I was in the unfortunate position of speaking inbetween two of my favorite geniuses, danah boyd and David Weinberger – I sang the obvious hymn to the choir, arguing that government in a Google age means transparency. All governments’ actions and information must be searchable and linkable; we need an API to government to enable us to build atop it.
I also argue that as newspapers die – and they will – government transparency is a critical element in the new news ecosystem that will fill the void. When government information is openly available, a dwindling handful of journalistic watchdogs in a state capital can be augmented by thousands, even millions of watchdogs: citizens empowered. I’ll write more about this as part of the New Business Models for News Project.
But at PDF, I also listed four cautions regarding transparency – charges to us as citizens:
* We have to give permission to fail. In speaking with government people about What Would Google Do?, I’ve learned how much they fear failure and how cautious that makes them. Without the license to fail, government will never experiment, never open up, and never be collaborative.
In other words, we need beta government: the ability of government to try things, to open up its process, to invite us in, to collaborate. That was the lesson I learned from Google about releasing a beta: it is a statement of humility and openness and an invitation to join in. We need that in government.
* Transparency must not always mean gotcha. Oh, there are plenty of people to catch red-handed. But if transparency is about nothing more than catching bureacrats and politicians buying lunches, then we will not have the openness we need to make government collaborative.
* We have to figure out how to make government and its work collaborative. What if we were able to help government do its job? What if it acted like a network? What if it acted like Wikipedia, where a small percentage – less than 2 percent, says Clay Shirky – create it; it would not take many citizens to help make government work in new ways.
* We have to turn the discussion to the positive, the constructive. Again, there are plenty of bastards to catch. But we must move past that – especially once we have more watchdogs watching – so we can build.
I ran around the auditorium like a fool – a role I enjoy – playing Oprah and asking everyone in the audience to say what they thought government for the Google age looked like. Since I was running, I couldn’t take notes, but the #pdf09 Twitter hashtag captured some and PDF will put up a video later. Lots of great thoughts.
China blinks
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009I said in What Would Google Do? – and argued the point in a talk at Google in Washington – that Google and other technology companies have more influence than they know – and should use it – in protecting free speech and pressuring censorious governments. I see evidence of the strategy working – or hope I see it – in China’s decision today to delay its noxious Green Dam requirement for all PCs sold there. Government and companies put pressure on; China blinked.
Yahoo’s new CEO, Carol Bartz, said in July that it’s not her job to fix governments. But neither is it a company’s job to enable tyrannical governments in their tyranny. Technology companies from Cisco to Nokia to Siemens that have provided technology to enable censorship and tracking, and companies from Yahoo to Google that have handed over information about users to governments that use it to oppress citizens should be ashamed. And we need to shame them. We need to give them cover by demanding behavior that is not and does not support evil.
In a digital age, censoring the internet, stopping citizens from connecting with each other, and using the internet to spy on and then oppress citizens is evil. We shame companies that helped enable fascist regimes in the ’30s and apartheid in the last century. Is it time for technology boycotts? I’m not sure. But it is time for the discussion.
The responsibility of knowledge in news
Saturday, June 20th, 2009I tweeted a few minutes that I wish YouTube itself would be curating and featuring video from Iran because only it is in the position to know whether the video came from Iran and whether it is a duplicate. I said that YouTube has a responsibility in the news ecosystem. Andy Scheurer questioned that: responsibility? Good question. Isn’t YouTube just a host? Can’t it be agnostic as to interests? No, I don’t think so, because YouTube has unique knowledge it can add to inform the discussion (e.g., this video isn’t from Iran or it’s a year old or this video is unique from Iran today) and to not add that knowledge becomes irresponsible, no? YouTube can’t just make the information transparent so we can figure it out because it also has a moral responsibility to protect the identity of those who are putting themselves in danger by uploading the videos to inform the world. That means they are the only ones who can verify at least some information about the videos for our benefit. So shouldn’t they?
What should Google do?
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009I’m about to give some WWGD? advice … to Google.
When I’m asked about Google’s weaknesses – and they do exist – I list its lack of transparency in certain areas of its business, especially advertising (even as we all need to be transparent if we want to be found in search), its policy toward China (where it should be a better defender of free speech), its size (just because government and competitors soon see too much success as a problem), the other frontiers it has not (yet) conquered (the live web, the social web, the local web, the deep web), and its sometimes unilateral power over its ad partners. The fact that Google ad rates are set by auction in the market insulates it fairly well from claims that it could use monopoly power to set prices. But the fact that Google decides who may and may not use AdSense does leave it vulnerable to accusations of misuse of power.
See Aaron Greenspan’s saga about his $761 small claims fight with Google about canceling his account. There are other such cases in the court. I don’t know the specifics of Greenspan’s others’ claims sufficiently to take sides in the disputes. Doesn’t matter. The point for Google is that it can’t win by holding the power itself. It will be accused of ruining little guys’ businesses (though in many cases, those business are spam blogs — and I wish Google would work harder to get rid of more of them faster) or of wielding a monopoly.
So what should Google do? What Would Google Do with Google?
I suggest that Google should hand over the power of adjudication of such disputes to the community of publishers and advertisers. It is in their interests, like Google’s, to maintain a credible marketplace that is not ruined by spammers and click-fraudsters. Google should still use its automated systems to eliminate them, as they pop up like zits on a geek. But when there are disputes, wouldn’t Google be wiser to hand the matter over to a wise council – whose members could be elected by Google’s community of business partners, small and large – to rule? That way, Google cannot be accused of being unfair and acting with unilateral power.
That, I think, would be the Googley thing to do. To paraphrase some of the rules in my book… It would hand over control to Google’s public. It would exhibit trust in that public. It would rely on the generosity of that public. It would be transparent, doing business in public. It would open-source the process. It would take advantage of the network Google already has and distribute the task. It would be a way to elegantly organize the community and its needs and rules. It would be a recognition that Google can make mistakes. It would be a case of doing what you do best and linking to the rest.
Conquering the world
Monday, June 8th, 2009What Would Google Do? got a nice bit of publicity in Croatia (I wasn’t so sure how good it would be when I saw the picture choices, but friends and Google translation say it’s OK).
What’s cool is that within a day, this yielded a book contract for a local edition with a Croatian publisher.
Now I wish I could get similar publicity anywhere in the Spanish-, Italian-, Swedish-, Arabic- speaking worlds.
The new Detroit isn’t Detroit
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009GM says it is reinventing itself. And what makes them or the government think they can do that on top of old infrastructure and old ways even with our billions? Good fucking luck.
Last week, I met the man who is really reinventing the car industry, Jay Rogers, founder of Local Motors. He is creating the platform and API for new cars that are designed collaboratively by communities and built in microfactories across the country by staffs of only 41 using almost entirely off-the-shelf parts. He says he will be profitable selling only 500 cars. He plans to build 3-5,000 of each model and he’s months away from delivering his first.
When I first looked at Local-Motors, I didn’t think it was for me. Its first model is a muscle car being built in and for the Arizona market. In a video, Rogers talks about being able to come into the microfactory to help build your own car. I try everything I can to avoid ever opening a hood or picking up a wrench. That’s why I buy Toyota.
But over lunch, Rogers made clear that he is building a company and cars in harmony with the vision for a new car company I suggested in What Would Google Do?.
It’s collaborative. Rogers set the broad goal for the first car but then the community designed and voted on designs for it. What’s fascinating is that (as I predicted could happen) they make economic decisions and trade-offs. Some really wanted an incredible taillight and Rogers said, fine, that’d cost a fortune to tool up to make and would raise the price of every car by $1,000. Nevermind, the community said; they took a $99 Honda lens and designed around it so you’d never know where it came from. This also means that Local Motors does what it does best and links to the rest, a key precept of WWGD?
The community takes ownership. And the company hands much – but not all – control to them. I wondered how the community defines itself and manages to settle its disputes. The company has to get involved and listen. Rogers said the most important hire a company can make today is a CCO, chief community officer. This isn’t anarchy or democracy. Rogers coins a rather high-fallutin’ phrase for what he advocated: bimodal intelligence. That is, everyone has a voice but at the end of the day, the company has a role to guide the process and product; that is the value the company adds but that works only if the company listens well.
It’s small. And small is the new big. That is precisely why GM and Chrysler are at a disadvantage against him, like newspapers against online entrepreneurs: The incumbents are saddled with huge infrastructure costs and have to do everything in big ways, including fail. And this means…
The mass market is dead, replaced by the mass of niches. I don’t want the same care you want. I want choice. Hundreds of microfactories can give it to me.
It’s a platform. I saw this more than Rogers did, but it’s clear that because Local Motors publishes its design data openly, I could start a company to provide parts and products for its cars. It enables others to build business on top of its platform. This means that…
Business is public. The more openly and collaboratively Local Motors does its business, the better it is for its products, customers, and relationships.
It’s local. I also didn’t understand this at first. But seeing the car being made for Arizona drivers, I get it. A car for New Yorkers will surely be different.
Middlemen are doomed. Local Motors has no dealers. The factory is the showroom. The customers are the salesmen.
And on and on….
I plan to visit Local Motors’ Boston headquarters to learn more. No, I’m not suggesting that this small company with its microfactory will replace GM, not yet. But this car company can innovate and invent and listen to customers far better than GM can. This car company can become profitable far faster.
Google Wave and news
Sunday, May 31st, 2009Never underestimate Google. That should have been my 41st WWGD? rule. Just as I was thinking they were behind the curve on the live web – and argued they should buy Twitter - Google attacked it from the left flank with Wave.
In Wave, I see more than a new generation of email cum wikis cum Twitter cum groupware. Because it can feed blog and web pages and Twitter, I see a new way to create content, collaborative and live. I see a new way to make news.
Imagine a team of reporters – together with witnesses on the scene – able to contribute photos and news to the same Wave (formerly known as a story or a page). One can write up what is known; a witness can add facts from the scene and photos; an editor or reader can ask questions. And it is all contained under a single address – a permalink for the story – that is constantly updated from a collaborative team.
Here, I speculated about the topic becoming the new atomic unit of news, supplanting the article with wikis that contained a snapshot of what we know now, blogs that treat news as the process it is, links (do what you do best, link to the rest), discussion, and media of all types, some even live (Twitter, Qik.com). Marissa Mayer also gave journalists advice on the new form of news, telling them they needed to maintain updates under a permalink for the story so it could be searched and found.
Wave takes this to the next level. It combines the notions of a process as people add and subtract and update; it has the benefit of a wiki – a snapshot of current knowledge; it can be live; it can feed a blog page with the latest; it can feed Twitter with updates; it is itself the collaborative tool that lets participants question each other.
Wave isn’t just the email we’d invent if email were invented today, as was Google’s goal. Wave is what news can be if we invent it today, as we must.
Wave is the new news.
: LATER: I just got email from Jay Parkinson, who is remaking health care at Hello Health. He, too, was impressed with the opportunities in Wave.
Replace news story with “disease you suffer from” and reporter with primary care doc and editor with specialist and photos with lab results, etc, and you can see its potential.
What about your line of work?
WWGD? DC talk
Saturday, May 30th, 2009I didn’t even know that my Q&A at Google’s DC HQ was up on YouTube. Here it is:
