A hastily written but fact filled book about the disruption Google is enabling in the media industry. The author takes full advantage of his deep connections in the media business and the people cited in the book would make quite a rolodex. Published in 2009 it covers through the fall of 2009 with pretty good depth of both the challenges Google presents to its competitors and the challenges Google faces itself. As anyone would do on Monday morning, the author has a habit of making decisions in the past seem obviously brilliant or not so -- when in fact they must have been more complicated at the time.
Key take aways:
- The main groups impacted by Google are the big ad agencies, content providers from newspapers to movie makers, platform owners from Microsoft to Amazon to eBay, and just emerging -- the carriers.
- Google considers itself the most customer focussed company on the planet and considers its customers to be the web user - not the advertiser. Google will lose the trust of the customer if it ever reverses these relationships.
- Google has 150 products and only one makes it any money.
- Google thinks YouTube is its next big thing.
- Google is inspired by the inefficiency of the sales process and believes that through better process engineering it can lower or eliminate the inefficiency of sales. It wants to be the salesforce for any large industry.
Links to other pretty good reviews of this book:
I think it is worth the time to read it. The line that sticks with me is turning analog dollars into digital dimes. You can find the book on Amazon.com by clicking this link.