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Product Description

A bold and vital book that asks and answers the most urgent question of today: What Would Google Do?

In a book that's one part prophecy, one part thought experiment, one part manifesto, and one part survival manual, internet impresario and blogging pioneer Jeff Jarvis reverse-engineers Google—the fastest-growing company in history—to discover forty clear and straightforward rules to manage and live by. At the same time, he illuminates the new worldview of the internet generation: how it challenges and destroys, but also opens up vast new opportunities. His findings are counterintuitive, imaginative, practical, and above all visionary, giving readers a glimpse of how everyone and everything—from corporations to governments, nations to individuals—must evolve in the Google era.

Along the way, he looks under the hood of a car designed by its drivers, ponders a worldwide university where the students design their curriculum, envisions an airline fueled by a social network, imagines the open-source restaurant, and examines a series of industries and institutions that will soon benefit from this book's central question.

The result is an astonishing, mind-opening book that, in the end, is not about Google. It's about you.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #44556 in Books
• Published on: 2009-01-27
• Released on: 2009-01-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .97" h x 6.26" w x 9.28" l, 1.01 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This scattered collection of rambling rants lauding Google's abilities to harness the power of the Internet Age generally misses the mark. Blog impresario Jarvis uses the company's success to trace aspects of the new customer-driven, user-generated, niche-market-oriented, customized and collaborative world. While his insights are stimulating, Jarvis's tone is acerbic and condescending; equally off-putting is his pervasive name-dropping. The book picks up in a section on media, where the author finally launches a fascinating discussion of how businesses—especially media and entertainment industries—can continue to evolve and profit by using Google's strategies. Unfortunately, Jarvis may have lost the reader by that point as his attempt to cover too many topics reads more like a series of frenzied blog posts than a manifesto for the Internet age. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Jarvis, columnist and blogger about media, presents his ideas for surviving and prospering in the Internet age, with its new set of rules for emerging technologies as well as industries such as retail, manufacturing, and service. We learn that customers are now in charge, people anywhere can find each other and join forces to support a company’s efforts or oppose them, life and business are more public, conversation has replaced marketing, and openness is the key to success. Jarvis’ other laws include being a platform (help users create products, businesses, communities, and networks of their own); hand over control to anyone; middlemen are doomed; and your worst customer is your best friend, and your best customer is your partner. Jarvis offers thought-provoking observations and valuable examples for individuals and businesses seeking to fully participate in our Internet culture and maximize the opportunities it offers. It is unclear what role Google played, if any, in the preparation of this book, which provides excellent advertising for the company. --Mary Whaley

Review
“Google is not just a company, it is an entirely new way of thinking about understanding who we are and what we want. Jarvis has done something really important: extend that approach to business and culture, revealing just how revolutionary it is.” (Chris Anderson, Author of The Long TailChris Anderson, author of The Long Tail )

“What Would Google Do? is an exceptional book that captures the massive changes the internet is effecting in our culture, in marketing, and in advertising.” (Craig Newmark, Founder of craigslist )

“Jeff Jarvis has written an indispensable guide to the business logic of the networked era, because he sees the opportunities in giving the people control, and understands the risks in letting your competitors get there first.” (Clay Shirky, Author of Here Comes Everybody )

“Jeff Jarvis’s What Would Google Do? is a divining rod for anyone looking for ways to hit real paydirt in the new territory of Web 2.0 marketing. Jarvis has a sharp eye for what is relevant, real, and actionable. Isn’t that what we all need today?” (Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO, salesforce.com )

“Most of Jarvis’s points—about customer influence, user-driven innovation, the death of middlemen—are by now axiomatic. And yet he manages to make the revolution feel newly revolutionary. . . . the book exudes credibility.” (Inc. )

“[Jarvis’s] bold thinking and prodigious faith results in a rollicking sermon on reinvention and reinvigoration.” (Miami Herald )

“[Jarvis] is an intelligent observer of technology and the media and has intellectual scruples.... [T]here are lessons to be learnt from Google and its single-minded determination to change how business is done.” (Financial Times )

“Jarvis, proprietor of the influential media blog BuzzMachine, gleans maxims from Google’s successful strategies that occasionally sound like doublespeak (Free is a business model! Abundance is the new scarcity! Correcting yourself enhances credibility!). But they boil down to practical suggestions.” (Time magazine )

“Blogger/columnist Jeff Jarvis’s treatise on how—and why—companies should think and act like Google brings to mind several trite words from the world of literary criticism: eye-opening, thought-provoking and enlightening.” (USA Today )

“[Jarvis’s] observations are worth reading....We’re never going to unplug the Internet, so read this book with the long view in mind. Mr. Jarvis’s rules don’t all apply to you, but they’re all true enough for someone” (Wall Street Journal )

“For those who haven’t thought much about how radically, rapidly and irreversibly the Internet has empowered us and changed our culture, “What Would Google Do?” by Jeff Jarvis will be revelatory. It is a stimulating exercise in thinking really, really big. “ (San Jose Mercury News )