What Would Google Do? Part 8

Let's visit a retailer who has learned and acted on many of these lessons and is eager to try more. Gary Vaynerchuk, a wine merchant in Springfield, New Jersey, burst onto the internet in 2006 with a daily video blog. Put down this book for a minute-just a minute-go to WineLibrary.TV, and watch one of his shows. Be prepared to be blown back by a jet-engine blast of personality and enthusiasm. Vaynerchuk is hardly the image of a wine snoot. He could just as easily be touting a horse or shouting about his favorite football team (the New York Jets). He's a guy's guy, a man of the people, and that's his point. He's democratizing wine.

Before starting his video blog, Vaynerchuk had already run a successful store with his Russian-immigrant father and family. They rebuilt the place into an impressive, two-story retail s.p.a.ce-a library of bottles-and grew revenue from $4 million to $60 million annually over a few years. The Wall Street Journal profiled him in 2006. I'd shopped in his store for years but met him first online.

His video blog made him a star. The show is seen by 80,000 people a day-no small feat for watching a guy holler about wine for 20 minutes and spit his sips into a Jets bucket. His pa.s.sion is infectious and so his fans spread it around. One day, deep into a show, he mentioned that he was planning an event in his store for his online community. Three-hundred "Vayniacs," as he calls his followers, showed up, flying from California and Florida.

Vaynerchuk got onto big TV thanks to the internet, appearing on Late Night with Conan O'Brien Late Night with Conan O'Brien, The Ellen Degeneres Show The Ellen Degeneres Show, and CNBC's Mad Money Mad Money with its equally forceful host, Jim Cramer. He got speaking engagements. Earlier, I told of his using Twitter to gather a flash party at the South by Southwest conference in Austin. At the conference, he spoke on a panel alongside his Hollywood agent. Then he published a book, with its equally forceful host, Jim Cramer. He got speaking engagements. Earlier, I told of his using Twitter to gather a flash party at the South by Southwest conference in Austin. At the conference, he spoke on a panel alongside his Hollywood agent. Then he published a book, 101 Wines Guaranteed to Inspire, Delight, and Bring Thunder to Your World 101 Wines Guaranteed to Inspire, Delight, and Bring Thunder to Your World. The moment it became available to order, Vaynerchuk's fans raised it to 36th place on Amazon's best-seller list. Vaynerchuk started a project to create a collaborative wine-Vayniac Cabernet 2007-concocted with input from his community, who even helped to crush the grapes. (I ordered some. It will arrive after this book is out, so I'll let you know how it is on my blog.) Vaynerchuk understood that he had to provide his community with a platform-a baseball field he called it-so they could play alongside him.

Vaynerchuk told me he wasn't becoming an internet star just to sell wine. He was building something bigger. He was investing in "brand Gary Vaynerchuk." That is why he chose to make his wine shows daily: "Content, baby, indexing in search." Everybody needs vin de Googlejus vin de Googlejus. The more of him there is online, the more he will be found. He is his own ad. The most important factors in retail success used to be location, location, location. Now they are links, Google, Googlejuice. I searched Google for "wine" and Vaynerchuk's store came up on the first page behind only one other retailer, Wine.com, which spent countless millions to build its brand and online positioning. I searched for "wine TV" and Vaynerchuk's show came up first, dominating the listings (where is the Food Network?). In this giant industry, that is nothing short of incredible. He built his brand and market position not with marketing dollars (though his is the only video blog I've ever seen advertised on a highway billboard in New Jersey). He built it with personality, enthusiasm, and relations.h.i.+ps in the internet connection machine.

Vaynerchuk is on a mission. "I want to change the way people think about wine and change the way people do business," he told me. On Cramer's Mad Money Mad Money, Vaynerchuk mocked wine and liquor conglomerates for doing nothing socially, acting like monolithic c.o.ke and not like viral brands such as Vitamin Water and Red Bull, which grew by turning customers into advertisers. Vaynerchuk's message: "Social business is the future of our society."

I told Vaynerchuk there were more things I wanted from his store to make it truly Googley. As I shop, I'd love to draw on the wisdom of his enthusiastic crowd and have them recommend wines to me. Wine, as Vaynerchuk says, is always about trying something new. On my latest visit, I came across a Gavi di Gavi. I couldn't recall what Vaynerchuk had said about the variety on his show. I asked a clerk, who told me it was fruity but dry and recommended it. That was helpful. But I don't know this guy and his palate. I'd prefer to have taken out my iPhone and punched in stock numbers to get Vaynerchuk's and his Vayniaks' reviews. Judging their taste by seeing the other wines they like, I would have been in a better position to decide whether to spend that $18. If I'm in a compet.i.tor's store that doesn't have a wine the Vayniaks like, I'm now motivated to buy it through Vaynerchuk's growing mail-order business. His customers are his clerks. A store creates value in the knowledge of its customers; that is an unseen a.s.set. It needs to find ways to capture, share, and exploit that value.

After I check out, I'd like a printout of the wines I bought with notes on each so I could choose an appropriate bottle for dinner and share the information with my guests. I'd like a record of my purchases to go online under my account at the wine community Vaynerchuk bought, Cork'd (at Corkd.com) so I could read others' tasting notes and add my own. Vaynerchuk agreed but said that when he first tried giving people cards that tracked their purchases, they a.s.sumed they'd be used only to give deeper discounts, not to build content and community. It didn't work then, but might now. Online, I've learned that sometimes an idea doesn't work just because it's tried too soon.

I would love it if the customers could tell Vaynerchuk what to buy. As with the chef in the kitchen, he's still the boss in the cellar. But I'd like to see whether there's a critical ma.s.s of Vayniacs who'd say, "Enough with the s.h.i.+raz already" or "merlot is the new pinot." Perhaps we'd ask him to hunt for a wine: a good Austrian dessert wine for less than $20. He could turn around and ask whether enough of us would be willing to buy that wine to make it worth his effort. Purchasing should become collaborative.

Most of what Vaynerchuk does-or what our dream restaurant would do-could be done in any establishment. Why not expose a store's sales data so I could use that information when I shop? Why not expose my own sales data to me and make suggestions on that basis? Why not gather and share reviews of products so I can make the best selection for my needs and leave happy? Why haven't local stores followed Amazon's lead with these services? In his book The Numerati The Numerati, Stephen Baker says that retailers are only just beginning to think of ways to exploit the data they have about us-like having our shopping carts make personal recommendations.

My wife and I sometimes ask our supermarket to stock a product, but that's a rare encounter with spotty results. Shouldn't the store have forums where customers could ask for products and managers could see when those requests reach critical ma.s.s? I know, this suggestion ignores one fundamental economic factor in grocery and other retail businesses-that brands pay fees for shelf s.p.a.ce that contribute to stores' bottom lines. But I have to believe that a store that sells me what I want to buy will be better off than a store that sells me what someone pays it to sell.

No local store or chain can compete with the just-in-time, inventory-light efficiency and limitless selection of an internet retailer. So I wonder how the role of the local store changes. Perhaps it becomes more of a showroom run by or for manufacturers. Rather than selling the merchandise right there, it might offer easy ordering and earn a commission. In the chapter on publis.h.i.+ng, I looked at printing books on demand. In the chapter on manufacturing, I ask how cars should be sold post-Google. If I were a merchant-a department store, a chain, a local retailer-I'd hope to find a way to curate unique merchandise for my customers as eBay and Etsy.com do for theirs. Maybe a store, like a newspaper, needs to become less a one-for-all clearinghouse of commodity goods and more a pathway to what I really want.

Perhaps a store, like a restaurant, can become a community built around particular needs, tastes, or pa.s.sions. Look at the data that is created and shared at Netflix and Amazon through sales rankings, automated recommendations, and customers' reviews. Now imagine starting direct conversations among these people. What could be unleashed when Vaynerchuk's customers and fans talk with each other, asking and answering questions, sharing opinions, finding new value in their a.s.sociation with and around him? It's hard to imagine such a community forming around a tire store, of course. But it's not hard to imagine many others where communities could grow: athletic stores (my local store promotes running clubs' events and Nike is holding its own races around the world to encourage such communities to form); food stores (where an instant community of olive-oil fans can gather around choosing which brands to order); electronics stores (if I can read ratings of TVs at Amazon, why can't I see them when I'm in Best Buy?); garden stores (anybody know how to keep the deer at bay?); hardware stores (let's share open-source plans for playhouses); toy stores (any advice for a grandparent buying an eight-year-old boy a video game?); and clothing stores (H&M should have a dating service: "Size 4 pet.i.te seeks 34-inch waist, 34-inch inseam, 42-long-no khakis, please").

Community members (aka customers) can become sales agents. Amazon's and BarnesAndn.o.ble.com's affiliate programs enable bloggers to share recommendations. If readers buy, the blogger gets a commission. The online shoe store Zappos has automated recommendation widgets for products. I'd bet Vaynerchuk's community would publish widgets selling their favorite wines. This could become irritating-I don't want my communities to become Tupperware parties. It could be corrupting if bloggers recommend products only to sell them. But the bloggers' brands and reputations are at stake. If I buy a wine you push and it's bad, I won't trust your judgment again. But if I find a new wine I like, I'll give credit to you and to the store that made it possible.

The internet has caused me to go to stores less often. I can't remember my last time in a department store. The mall, where I once browsed, now bores me. Wal-Mart's size scares me. I still enjoy Apple stores but that's often for the education and the free wi-fi and sometimes for the opportunity to ask a fellow cult member for advice. Stores have become dull. Their merchandise is the same and they have less selection than I find online. They are stocking fewer items and running out more often. They charge higher prices than I can find searching the internet. Sales clerks give me less information about products than I can get from Google and fellow customers. And I have to drive to stores, using ever-more-expensive gas and time.

The store's salvation is its customers. Rather than treating the internet as a compet.i.tor, retailers should follow Vaynerchuk and use it as a platform. Enable your customers to help you stand out from the crowd. Why should I go to your sneaker store, car dealers.h.i.+p, or wine store to buy the exact same merchandise I can find in a thousand stores and sites just like yours? Price will no longer get me there; I can find the best prices by Googling, not driving. Good service? That should be a.s.sumed. Information? I'll trust it more if it comes from the community of shoppers. How can you connect with that community? How-to follow Zuckerberg's law-can you help them organize? How-to follow Vaynerchuk's law-can you build a ball field where they want to play? Turn the store inside out and build it around people more than products. Your customers are your brand. Your company is the company it keeps.

Utilities

Google Power & Light GT&T.

Google Power & Light: What Google would do What Google would do

Here is our one example of an industry being remade in Google's image that is not hypothetical. Google.org, the company's philanthropic wing-supported with 1 percent of Google's equity and profits-is trying to reinvent the energy industry and with it, our energy economy. It is funding companies and research looking for ways to make power that will cost less than that generated with coal. Their geeky name for the initiative: RE< p="">

Unlike Google.org's other projects-devoted to early warning of health crises, better management of public services, and entrepreneurial growth in the developing world-RE< p="">

At the World Economic Forum meeting at Davos in 2008, I attended a forum at which Google's founders presented their energy vision and I came away with a sense of how they would manage other industries and even how they would run the government (more on that later). It gave me a window into the engineers' worldview. Just before this Google.org forum, I had attended a session with Bono and former Vice President Al Gore. They presented their core causes: extreme poverty, debt forgiveness, and disease for Bono; the planet for Gore. The two men tried to insist to the powerful in the great hall that their causes were complementary-can't solve one without addressing the other, they agreed-but in truth, they were competing for the political and economic attention of the governments and corporations there. Gore spoke with pa.s.sion, even anger, as he insisted that the way to attack global warming is carbon taxes, regulations, prohibitions, sacrifices. He delivered the environmental agenda we've often heard, and did so with authority and determination.

Then I went up the mountain to hear the Google team-founders Page and Brin with Google.org executive director Larry Brilliant. The contrast was stark. To summarize if not oversimplify their vantage points: Where Gore demands taxes and regulation, the Google team proposes invention and investment. Gore and company want to raise the cost of carbon-the cost of polluting-whereas the Google team wants to lower the cost of energy. I'm a bit unfair to Gore, for he would argue that the proceeds of his taxes would fund technology development. But Google doesn't need tax dollars. If it were a country, its $20 billion revenue would rank it about 80th in gross domestic product. It can invest in energy research on its own.

Still, we see different worldviews at work. "You can't succeed just out of conservation because then you won't have economic development," Brilliant said. "Find a way to make electricity-not to cut back on it but to have more of it than you ever dreamed of." More power than you ever dreamed of. Create and manage abundance rather than control scarcity-as ever, that is the Google worldview. Whereas Gore talks about what we shouldn't do, Google talks about what we can do. There we see the contrast between the politician's brain and the engineer's. Google people start with a problem and look for a solution. They identify a need, find an opportunity, and then systemically, logically, and aggressively attack it with innovation.

Page explained that there is a market now for green energy at 10 cents per kilowatt-hour. Some people and companies want to buy it, though it is expensive, because they want to do good or need good PR. But the true market cost of energy is still far below that. Google.org wants to find a way to produce renewable power at three cents per kilowatt-hour, cheaper than coal, which not only gives them a good deal but also shuts down dirty coal plants.

If it succeeds, the foundation would change Google's business and other entire industries, starting with autos. With energy that cheap, Google.org envisions cars plugged into the power grid, solving the problem of pollution from burning gasoline and changing the political balance of oil power (though they point out that the power grid is in woeful need of an upgrade). Google is also supporting an electric-car initiative called RechargeIT, which is trying to accelerate the adoption of plug-in hybrid cars. As a demonstration, Google is converting its own fleet of cars to modified, plug-in Toyota Prius hybrids. Google set up web pages for every car to display data about its energy efficiency-we know how Google loves data. Those cars are plugged into solar-powered charging stations on Google's campus, where the company was producing 1.6 megawatts in solar power by 2008. "It's been great," Brin said. "It produced shade. It reduced cost." Google created a platform for electric-car devotees to make YouTube videos and place them on a Google map, demonstrating popular support and demand for the cars. Google clearly believes it can help create a market for plug-in cars-and why not? It has created new markets for technology and advertising.

Brin said at Davos that Google has an advantage over inc.u.mbent oil companies because it does not have a legacy energy business to protect from cannibalization. Still, he was asked, aren't his shareholders going to have a problem with this quixotic investment? The investment is moderate, Page replied, and the payoff is great.

Brin said the foundation's research is concentrating on three energy sources-solar-thermal, deep geothermal, and high-alt.i.tude wind-in addition to photovoltaic power. Wind is already as cheap as coal, he explained, but it's intermittent and unreliable on the ground. That's why they're experimenting with high-alt.i.tude kites, which operate in constant wind and are cheaper to make than windmills. Deep geothermal requires fundamental research to become viable, but Google.org is making that investment for the long-term.

Though Google has hired experts to work on energy in its own R&D labs, it isn't doing the work alone. As of mid-2008, it had invested $36 million in outside R&D on power in addition to more than $4 million in RechargeIT. Google is not alone in seeing investment opportunities. At Davos, venture capitalist John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins-who invested in Google and sits on its board-held a reception for Bono and Gore (who advises both Google and Kleiner Perkins). Doerr talked about urgent needs and opportunities in energy; by 2008, his firm had raised $1 billion to invest in clean technology.

If Google did run a power company, what would it look like? It would give us all the power we could use at the best price possible, and then it would find ways to take advantage of that. Google could use the power grid itself to distribute the internet and that, too, would help Google, creating more advertising revenue, which could be used to subsidize the cost of our power and access. Google would give us data about our use of power-especially as more appliances become internet-connected. Imagine if every house were to have a web page detailing power usage by every device, as Google has done for its cars. That data would tell us how to conserve (if we even needed to anymore) and it would tell Google how we live (which, in aggregate, will make Google smarter). In his book Hot, Flat, and Crowded Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Thomas Friedman proposed a similar future with connected devices that manage their own power. If we can generate our own homemade solar, wind, or geothermal power, I have no doubt Google Power & Light would create a marketplace for us to sell power to the grid or donate it to charities. Power could become not only a new market but a new currency.

It's too bad there never will be a Google Power & Light. It's just not what they do for a living. But Google, being Google, may well remake the industry anyway.

GT&T: What Google should do What Google should do

If only Google ran our cable and phone companies, how much better our lives would be and how much less time we'd spend on hold and at home waiting for the cable guy.

Well, Google has almost had cable and phone companies. The company gives away free wireless internet access in Mountain View, California, its headquarters' town. It has been rumored to be thinking of offering public wi-fi in other cities but denies such plans. It also had been rumored to be working on making its own Google phone. Instead, it created an open mobile operating system, which any phone manufacturer may use (T-Mobile released the first). In an effort to push the Federal Communications Commission and the mobile phone industry toward openness, Google bid in an auction of wireless spectrum in 2008, making a bargain with the government: Google would guarantee a minimum price of $4.6 billion if the FCC required openness-that is, that any device (such as those powered by Google's operating system) could operate on much of the spectrum bought and run by the phone companies. Google didn't win the auction-it won the point. For a few hours, though, it had the highest bid on the table and could have ended up with spectrum and a phone company.

In a forum in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., Larry Page looked a bit dreamy and wistful as he recalled that for a day, his company was in the phone business. Imagine what he could have done with that. At this moment in the show, we should see Page scratching his chin and looking upward as a cloud floats over his head and he ponders an alternative future, a vision based on openness and ubiquitous connectivity. That's the real dream: Google everywhere. Google is constantly nudging to get more internet access for more people at better prices. This campaign is in its self-interest. "If we have 10 percent better connectivity in the U.S.," Page told Reuters, "we get 10 percent more revenue in the U.S., and those are big numbers for us."

Page was in the capital to lobby the government to take the so-called white s.p.a.ces between TV channels-which become available as the U.S. switches to digital television-and make them freely accessible, like frequencies used for wi-fi. The move would enable the creation of "wi-fi on steroids," which proponents say could give us speeds in the billions of bits a second versus the millions we get now. We could watch, make, and transmit video anywhere. It would goose America's shameful broadband penetration, which in 2007 stood 15th in the world, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. U.S. users pay roughly twice what the j.a.panese do for access that is, on average, 10 times slower, OECD says.

Others don't like Google's idea for the white s.p.a.ces. The National a.s.sociation of Broadcasters fought it, saying the plan could interfere with their signals. I'd say they also don't want to make it easy for yet more compet.i.tors to grab more of our attention. Cable companies don't like Google's idea; they're making margins as high as 40 percent on internet access and don't want more compet.i.tion and disruption. Phone companies don't like it as they're just getting into the cable business. Mobile phone companies don't like it, for once we get broadband on any device, we can use it to do anything, even make phone calls from the web without paying for minutes. With open devices-the ones Google insisted on with the FCC and the ones Google is enabling with its mobile operating system-on open networks we can kiss our two-year contracts and early-cancellation fees good-bye.

Telecommunications is a perfect arena for Google because it's ripe for disruption in business models enabled by technology-Google's specialty. Google doesn't want to be in the wires-and-pipes business, but if our connectivity were freed from its constraints, Google would benefit. We'd spend more time online. We'd create and consume more. Google would have more to search and organize. Google would serve more ads. It would make more money. We would spend less money. It's a magnificent conspiracy of Google and everyone who opposes telecommunications oligopolies.

Who wouldn't like to stick it to the cable guy? The American Customer Satisfaction Index from the University of Michigan said in 2007 that cable and satellite TV suffered "the lowest level of customer satisfaction among all industries covered." The survey attributes some of the problem to the monopolies these companies held and the pricing control that allowed: "Comcast is one of the lowest scoring companies in ACSI. As its customer satisfaction eroded by 7 percent over the past year, revenue increased by 12 percent. Net income went up by 175 percent and Comcast's stock price climbed nearly 50 percent." Let's replay those numbers: Even as we hated the cable company more, its revenue, profit, and stock price all climbed. That might work today. But Wall Street must someday learn that angering customers is not a sustainable business model.

Advertising Age's Bob Garfield got angry at Comcast over his simple effort to get service at home. Garfield-who has confessed to envy of my Dell h.e.l.l-launched a crusade against Comcast in a screed in Ad Age, in a podcast, and on a blog called Comcast Must Die, where he urged customers to share their nightmares. "Congratulations," he told them. "You are no longer just an angry, mistreated customer. Nor, I hope, are you just part of an e-mob. But you are a revolutionary, wresting control from the oligarchs, and claiming it for the consumer. Your power is enormous. Use it wisely." Comcast responded by a.s.signing a vice president to read blogs and Twitter and deal with complaints and problems there. That helps, but it doesn't solve the essential problem: Cable companies exist to frustrate us. I responded to Garfield on my blog, suggesting that a more constructive approach might be to help Comcast reinvent itself.

What would an ideal cable and telecom company-Google Telephone & Telegraph-look like? First and foremost, it would be a platform that exists to help us do what we want to do. More than making calls and consuming content, it would turn the pipes around and help us create, share, and sell. It would be the home and host of our ambitions. Just as Google bought Blogger, allowing us to publish, and YouTube, allowing us to broadcast, its cable company would be our personal technology platform with tools to create content, products, and even companies. If we succeed, it succeeds.

Even if we did not have such creative ambitions, Google would still provide no end of services in our personal computing clouds. It does that already with Gmail-the best webmail and best spam-fighter out there; Google Docs-free and collaborative word-processing and spreadsheets; Google Calendar; Google Maps; Google Apps. If Google were my local cable and phone company, I'd expect it to provide the means for me and my neighbors to join groups and share information (which is what local newspapers should be doing as well). My neighborhood and town should be searchable. Google has started playing in the local arena with maps, news, and ads, but imagine when Google becomes truly local and I get a version of it and its services tailored to my area, my office, even my family and house.

GT&T would be open. Gone soon will be the days when a company can make its money by telling customers what they cannot do, as cable companies long have done (you can't upload that much; you can't watch the shows you've already bought without paying extra for our on-demand service; you can't put as many TVs in your home as you want without paying more; you can't watch a TV without adding our cable box; you can't buy just the channels you want but instead have to buy overpriced bundles; you can't get a time when our technician will actually show up...). Google knows that the more we use the internet, the better off it-and its hypothetical cable and phone company-would be.

I think GT&T would give us portability: Just as I can get my email anywhere on any device thanks to Gmail, I should be able to get the video programming I paid for in any room of the house or even in a hotel room across the country-without the need for cable boxes, TiVos, or Sling-boxes. My inability to do this today isn't fully the fault of the cable company; it's the result of archaic notions of copyright protection designed for outmoded technology. Studios and networks have argued that it would be a copyright violation if the cable company kept a copy of a movie I'd bought on its server so I could get it from anywhere. But there's hope this practice will change after an appeals court decided in 2008 that remote storage is not a violation. The other barrier to portability is hardware. Cable companies are in the business of renting cable boxes to us, thus amortizing their cost and giving them control. Cable companies don't see how renting boxes limits them, adding to their capital outlay, delaying technical improvements, and reducing our use of their service. GT&T would put forward open standards for everyone who makes TVs or video recorders, eliminating boxes and enabling anything to plug into the network, as on the internet. Google followed that model of openness-increasing use and utility-when it released its open-source browser, Chrome. There is hope on the hardware front as consumer-electronics and cable companies have at long last agreed to allow some integration of devices.

Google would understand that in a larger network of content and information, its opportunity would be to help us find what we want. It would provide a guide to cable as it provides a guide to the world's information. GT&T would become the new TV Guide and the new TiVo mixed in with a search engine and a social network. Where would it get that guide information? Where Google gets it now: from us, from the crowd. We'd all be networks, recommending shows to each other, no longer caged by the taste and schedules of a few networks. We'd act as a ma.s.s of niches, not a ma.s.s. No doubt Google would a.n.a.lyze data about our actions and taste and feed that back to us as recommendations, as it does today in search. Why wouldn't GT&T become the great personalized search engine of entertainment, the Google of culture? If somebody else doesn't do it first, they probably will.

One doesn't think of Google as a customer-service company. Its stuff just works. I rarely hear people complain about them as we do about phone and cable companies. After I told Doc Searls, another coauthor of The Cluetrain Manifesto The Cluetrain Manifesto, about my book, he blogged about his customer-service experience with Google. He needed to register a domain and if you've ever done that-at Network Solutions, G.o.daddy, or other sites-you know that it can be a cluttered maze of attempts to get you to forget to click on boxes so you get charged for extra services. (It's a variation on an old sales trick: When I worked at Ponderosa Steak House as a teen, we were taught to raise a ladle of canned mushroom gravy over a diner's steak and ask, as if "no" were not an option, "Mushroom sauce?") "Without exception, my experience with domain name registrars has been an upstream slog against a torrent of promotional distractions," Searls wrote. "n.o.body hates white s.p.a.ce more than a domain-name registrar." But when he discovered that Google offered this service for $10, he used it and in minutes, was done. "I used Google because I trust them not to treat me like cattle-or worse, as a potential sucker.... I bought this domain name from Google because I have a mutually respectful relations.h.i.+p with them. That relations.h.i.+p does not require human involvement, but it does require human values. Especially respect."

GT&T would make a compact with customers to provide reliable service. When it fails, we could use Google's own tools against it. We could put up a Google map that we all fill in when we have trouble with our cable. We could record our conversations with customer-service people and put that and our complaints on YouTube, searchable via Google. We could share how fast our bandwidth is at every address and publish it all in a Google Docs spreadsheet. Google would know that it couldn't fight us or win trying. Google is a platform for watching Google.

Would we ever have to wait all day for the Google cable guy to show up? No. If "cable" were wireless and worked with any device that met open standards, there'd be nothing to string to our homes, nothing to install, nothing to come fix. We could choose to use our bandwidth just as we wanted, as we use our power and water at will. I want a cable company that follows Jarvis' First Law. Wouldn't that be novel: control in customers' hands?

How would GT&T profit? How else? Advertising. It might still have to charge us for bandwidth and services. But Google would be smart enough to create new means to target local and national ads to us, using that revenue to subsidize the service so it would cost us less and we would use it more. Thus GT&T would make yet more money: a virtuous economic circle. Bandwidth could be free if what we do with it has enough value.

I wish Google would change its mind and get into the cable and phone business. But if it doesn't, there's no reason our cable torturers should not operate as I've outlined. You don't need to be Google to act like Google.

Manufacturing

The Googlemobile Google Cola

The Googlemobile: From secrecy to sharing From secrecy to sharing

I sat with carmakers some time ago and suggested what I feared was blasphemy: I urged them to open up their design process and make it both transparent and collaborative. Car companies have no good way to listen to customers' ideas. If they had, years before, I would have been among the legions who'd have gladly told them they should invest 39 cents in a plug for car radios so we could connect our iPods. Every time I try to listen to podcasts in the car via various kludges-FM transmitters that couldn't transmit an inch away and ca.s.sette-tape gizmos (if you still have a ca.s.sette deck) that are loud and unreliable-I curse car companies and their suppliers. At least let us help design the radios you install, I urged.

My plea was sacrilegious because automakers have long been secretive about design. Design and surprise, they think, are their special sauce. That's why they cloak new models like cla.s.sified weapons, setting off games of cat-and-car with photographers who try to scoop the secrets. Apart from the most fanatical car fan, do the rest of us still care? The antic.i.p.ation I remember about a new year's cars-like a new season's TV shows-is gone. Cars have lost their season. They stay the same year upon year. They all start to look alike. They rarely engender excitement. How could a car company reinject affection into its products and brands-how could it get a little love? By involving customers, I argue-by turning out cars customers want because they had a chance to say what they want.

Internet a.n.a.lyst Jeremiah Owyang compiled a list of auto industry social-media efforts on his blog: Some automakers let customers make their own ads for cars, make their own emblems, or color pictures of cars. GM's vice chairman, Bob Lutz, blogs. Chrysler has solicited customers' ideas-but in a closed form that prevents them from commenting on each others' suggestions. Chrysler also created a customer advisory board of 5,000 selected drivers. The Mini has its active community of owners.

The problem with these efforts is that they do not allow customers to openly affect the product. Perhaps one of the ideas presented to Chrysler in emails or discussed in the Mini's community might influence a decision that will come off the line in a few years. But we'd never know it. Indeed, the companies' efforts at interactivity work hard to keep the customer from doing harm. This is interactivity as defined by a children's museum: Here are the b.u.t.tons you may push without breaking anything; knock yourself out, kids. But just as companies should hand over their brands to customers so should they hand over their products.

What if just one model from one brand were opened up to collaborative design? Once more, I don't suggest that design should be a democracy. But shouldn't design at least be a conversation? Designers can put their ideas on the web. Customers can make suggestions and discuss them. Designers can take the best ideas and adapt them, giving credit where it is due. I don't imagine customers would collaborate on transmission or fuel-pump design-though a few might have great suggestions if given a chance. But they would have a lot to contribute on the pa.s.senger compartment, the look of the car, the features, and the options. They could even get involved in economic decisions: Would you be willing to give up power windows if it got you a less-expensive car or a nicer radio? This collaboration would invest customers in the product. It would build excitement. It would get the product talked about on the web and linked to and that would earn it Googlejuice. It could change the relations.h.i.+p of customers to the brand and that would change the brand itself. Imagine that: the collaborative community car-our car.

A car company could take any existing brand and model and work with the community that already exists around it. Go to Facebook and you'll find communities of greater or lesser involvement and affection around many car brands. I lost count of the Facebook groups for BMW when I hit 500. They included, with more than 800 members, the "If the BMW M5 was a woman I would marry it" group in addition to the "I hate BMW drivers, they are all c-ts" group with 510 members and, with 446 joiners, the "I p.i.s.s people off, cause I drive a BMW" group (don't invite the latter two to the same party). At Meetup, there are six clubs where people gather with their Beemers. BMW has its own official car club offering 75,000 members rebates on cars and discounts on Brooks Brothers clothes (do they see the demographic humor in that?). These are the company's best customers, its partners. BMW should solicit their help in designing cars, supporting fellow drivers (there's a little of that in the club forums), and even selling cars.

On Facebook, BMW invited customers to color pictures of its car. It's hard to imagine something more children's museum-like than a company enticing adults to color cars. But more than 9,000 people submitted their designs in only a few days. What that tells me is not just that they love their BMWs but that they would love BMWs that looked unique-BMWs that expressed their muses as well as their libidos. What an opportunity the industry has to bring humanity and personality back to cars. If so many of us like to express ourselves in blogs; YouTube videos; Facebook, Bebo, and Mys.p.a.ce pages; and Flickr photos-if, as Google understands, many of us want to have a strong ident.i.ty online through self-expression-why wouldn't we want to express ourselves through our cars? Companies have turned their products into commodities by imposing such sameness on them. I know, it's about efficiency-four lines of cars built under four brands on the same body with the same engine and parts makes them cost-effective. Factory efficiency and dealer economics also stop us from ordering custom-made cars anymore. We buy off the lot, not out of the factory, and we buy cars that are often loaded-like cable subscriptions-with things we don't want. (Every time I start my car, I turn off the night-vision rearview mirror, a $100-plus option I didn't want but had to buy.) Sure, there's an aftermarket for options-piney scent strips, hubcaps that spin, mud flaps with mirrors in the shape of naked women-but, well, that's just not me.

Toyota's Scion took a small step toward personalization when it enabled drivers to design crests for their cars. Now go the next step and imagine I could take an unpainted car to any of those BMW designers on Facebook or my student the graffiti artist and have my car painted so that it looks like no other. It'll cost me. But I'll bond with that car and love it because it's an expression of me.

That unpainted car would be the beginning of an auto company thinking open-source. What if the company also produced a car onto which I could graft someone else's dashboard or seats or grill or engine? Earlier, I talked about Google replacing its fleet of company cars with Toyota Prius hybrids that were modified so their extra batteries could be recharged with solar power. That is the Googlemobile. Google treated the Prius as a platform. Toyota should be delighted. It should build in opportunities to modify its car in countless ways. I can hear the objections: It could complicate production, raise costs, and confuse brands. Maybe. But it could give me the car I want. The car company of the future should be a platform for more car companies that make the automobiles drivers want, not the ones they settle for.

There are projects aimed at building the open-source car, among them Oscar from Germany, the c,mm,n (or common) hydrogen car from universities in the Netherlands, and the Society for Sustainable Mobility car (being built with 150 part-time engineers, according to Fast Company). The Aptera from Bill Gross' IdeaLab (more from him later, in the chapter, "Google Capital") is a beautiful, three-wheeled hybrid or electric vehicle set to launch in California. Tesla Motors is building a six-figure-plus all-electric sports car with funding from one of PayPal's founders. They are all cool and I wish them luck. But it's d.a.m.ned difficult to get a car company operating at scale-ask John DeLorean.

That is why I think a car company that already operates at scale should think open-source and welcome these nascent efforts to build atop them. Imagine seeing a million Priuses, Saturns, Fords, or Apteras on the road and wondering what's inside each, what makes it run, who painted it, where you can get that great grill. Imagine being given the power to customize your car from the ground up. Cars would be exciting again. Give me control of my car and I will own that brand, make that brand, love that brand, and sell that brand because it is mine, not yours. That will be the key to marketing Googlemobiles: pa.s.sion, individuality, creation, choice, excitement, newness. Drivers will start Facebook groups, blogs, and Meetup clubs extolling the wonders of the cars they choose-no, make. Outside product designers and manufacturers will accessorize and improve the open-source car-as outside developers make Facebook apps and mash up Google Maps-which will support new businesses and help sell more cars. There is the advantage of being a platform.

Now we come to the big problem facing car companies: dealers. We don't like car salesmen (in a 2007 Gallup survey, Americans rated them at the bottom-tied with lobbyists-with only 5 percent saying dealers had high honesty and ethics). They add little or no value to the transaction and none to the product. They make buying a car uncomfortable. Car companies in the U.S. are stuck with franchise laws that won't allow them to sell directly. So what should they do? I suggest they start by creating a platform for customers to say just what they think of car salesmen so companies can rub dealers' noses in it. Perhaps the voice of the people will reach and convince Congress to deregulate and open up car sales. We now do most of our car shopping online. We comparison shop, read reviews, review specs, and talk with friends. All we need the dealer for is a test drive. Once I know I want a car, why should I have to drive to the dealer; why doesn't the dealer or a manufacturer's representative deliver the car to me? Why can't I buy a car at the auto show? Why should I have to negotiate with three dealers for the exact same product when open pricing online has already told me what the market will bear? The dealer structure builds in inefficiencies and costs that the industry-and we-cannot afford.

The repair system is little better. My warranty is really an insurance policy that I should be able to redeem at any repair shop. The car company could still provide training-I would prefer to go to someone certified-and would sell parts. If the repair market were more compet.i.tive, the car company and I would each benefit.

I discussed my rationale for the open-source car platform with Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist you'll hear from shortly, and asked him what a Googley car company would look like. He said it already exists. It's Zipcar, which provides 5,000 cars to 200,000 drivers in various cities and campuses. Drivers join Zipcar for $50 a month, then make reservations online and pick up a car in any of a number of garages, paying $9 an hour or $65 a day in New York, including insurance, gas, and 180 miles. I can get similar rates from traditional rental companies but with less flexibility and convenience. Zipcar says each of its cars replaces 15 privately owned cars and that 40 percent of its members decide to give up owning a car. Similarly, Paris' mayor announced in 2008 that the city would follow its successful bike-sharing program by making 4,000 electric cars available to residents to pick up and drop off at 700 locations. The goal is to get Parisians to buy fewer cars.

I know what you're thinking (and can hear the peals of laughter all the way from Detroit): The last thing a car company should want is fewer cars. Are you nuts, Jarvis? Are you a communist or some tree-hugging fanatic? No. I'm just turning the industry upside-down. When I put the question to adman Rishad Tobaccowala, whose agency works in the auto industry, he said Detroit is not really in the business of making cars. He channeled the Googley car company and said: "I'm in the business of moving people from place A to place B. How can I do it in different ways? And as they are moving from place A to place B, how do I make them feel secure and connected?" He said that except for sleep, we spend more time moving around than at home. "Screw Starbucks as the 'third place.' The third place today is the automobile." What is the automobile really about? "Navigation and entertainment," he said-not necessarily manufacturing. Indeed, Tobaccowala said the most interesting parts of the General Motors business had been OnStar and-credit crunch aside-financing. Manufacturing is expensive, vulnerable to commodity pricing, labor-intensive, weighed down by gigantic benefit costs, and compet.i.tive. There's the tyranny of atoms.

What if a car company became the leader in getting people around and used others' hardware: planes, trains, and automobiles? You tell the system where you need to go-or with access to your Google Calendar, it just knows-and it gives you choices at various price points: Today, you can take the train for less. Tomorrow, you drive because you're running errands. The day after, you carpool to save money. This weekend, you get a nice Mercedes for the anniversary dinner. Next week, you take a chauffeur-driven car to impress clients. Along the way, you can pay for options: your entertainment synced in the car, wireless connectivity on the train, alerts to your iPhone, navigation concierges who direct you around jams. This is the new personal transportation and connections company built on the old car company as a platform. Hop aboard the Googlemobile.

Google Cola: We're more than consumers We're more than consumers

If big cars are hard to Googlify, packaged consumer products are harder. They are the building blocks of the ma.s.s market, predicated on manufacturing efficiency and marketing to a critical ma.s.s. Since the beginning of the internet as an advertising medium, it has been a truism that no one will click on a banner ad for-let alone join a club or write a blog post about-toilet paper. TP is everyone's example of a product that could not possibly benefit from the web. There's nothing Googley about toilet paper. Right? Besides perhaps getting TP printed with Wikipedia's knowledge (there are TP publishers) or made from renewable, recycled resources, I must concede: I can't conceive of Google Ultra Soft Toilet Tissue.

Are all consumer products doomed to life without Googlification? Let's imagine Google Cola. The strength and weakness of cola, like other consumer products, is that it is intended to be one-size-fits-all. Yes, a number of cola brands and variations fight for scarce supermarket shelf s.p.a.ce. But there are never enough varieties. I can't find my perfect cola. Mine would be caffeine-free but made with sugar instead of artificial sweeteners (can't stand the aftertaste) and it would come in a small can so it wouldn't go flat, or better yet, a bottle that could be reused. It might have a flavor added (cherry today, coffee tomorrow). I'll take c.o.ke or Pepsi (I'm bicola), but I don't like off-brands (I still shudder remembering Howard Johnson's HoJo Cola). What if c.o.ke retooled a bottler to make special-order batches to be delivered-but only if I committed to buying so many cases a year? I would pay a premium to subscribe to my perfect cola.

If I sold this Jeff Cola to others on my blog or in the neighborhood (convincing them that decaf coffee-flavored soda is not an oxymoron) perhaps my price could drop because I'd be bringing in more sales and volume. I'd create a cola club. It's no different from Gary Vaynerchuk's Vayniaks making and promoting their own wine. We'd become product managers and salespeople as well as consumers and customers. We could invent our own flavors of c.o.ke, sold under our brand, using c.o.ke as a platform for manufacturing and distribution. We'd be in the cola business. Will my cola go ma.s.s? Not a chance. But a bunch of smalls could add up to a big, and c.o.ke ends up in a new and loyal relations.h.i.+p with a lot of customers. It learns more about the public's taste and may develop new products to sell on a larger scale. It saves on marketing as collaborators sell products. It gets a piece of businesses that might otherwise take bits of market share. It finds a way to battle the tide of commodification in consumer products and joins in the small-is-the-new-big economy.

The cola strategy could be applied to most any consumable product that would benefit from specialization and personalization: cookies, candy, ecological home-cleaning products with personalized scents. It could be executed not just by big companies but also and more likely by small ones using sales platforms such as Amazon and eBay. About the only ma.s.s product I know that customizes today is M&Ms, which you can order printed with a photo ($39 for 21 ounces) or a custom color ($48 for 56 ounces). That's a nice gimmick, but it doesn't change the essence of the product. What if I could get coffee-flavored M&Ms or my decaf coffee-and-M&M-flavored soft drink in bottles for me and the hundred people I found like me? That would be Google Cola.

How about gadgets, then? Personal electronics might seem immune from Googlification because they are so complex in engineering and manufacturing. Yet technology is also what makes gadgets easier to change than cars, as a device can be updated via software instead of hardware. That's what Google is doing by offering its mobile operating system to any phone maker.

I could see Google proposing open standards for no end of connected devices. We can already buy refrigerators with internet screens. Their fabled promise is that someday they will take inventory of what's inside, telling us what we can make with what we have and automatically ordering what we need. That's the kind of information Google would love to organize. Home-delivery services Fresh Direct and Peapod in the U.S. and Tesco in the U.K. could order and deliver what we need and give us coupons for related products. Epicurious.com could suggest recipes based on what's in the fridge. Refrigerators become platforms for these companies to serve us.

We have connected home-security systems with sensors and cameras. We have connected home-entertainment systems that can pipe web radio stations, iTunes music and movies, and YouTube videos to any device in the home. We will have connected cars with links to traffic information and feeds of entertainment. We have cameras connected to GPS satellites and to our computers. We have mobile phones that are becoming computers. Any device that produces information, that can be personalized or adjusted, or that communicates with or entertains us will be connected to the internet and to Google. Google will listen to and speak through these gadgets-if we give it permission-and deliver related information. Google would love to use that information to give us highly targeted and relevant advertising. That might freak privacy warriors. But if we can control that flow and benefit from it (with relevant content and ads, bargains, and subsidies for the services we use), I'd hook up my fridge and phone. Google could become the operating system not just for the web and the world but for our homes and lives.

Another challenge: fas.h.i.+on. We know what Googley fas.h.i.+on is: T-s.h.i.+rts, shorts, and sandals. It's hard to imagine spartan, garish, geeky Google having an impact on taste and trendsetting, which are decreed by designers, fas.h.i.+on editors, and Hollywood. Fas.h.i.+on is top-down-or it was. Just as the internet democratizes news and entertainment, it is opening up style. A darling of the open fas.h.i.+on movement is Threadless, a T-s.h.i.+rt company that invites users to submit designs, which are voted on, Digg-like, by the community. Winning designers receive $2,000 plus a $500 credit and $500 every time a design is reprinted. They become the Versaces of the crowdsourced runway.

Just as in entertainment, we are learning that the public wants to create and leave its mark. A smart response is to create a platform to make that possible. CafePress.com and Zazzle provide the means for anyone to make and sell designs on T-s.h.i.+rts, mugs, b.u.mper stickers, even underwear, getting a cut of every on-demand order. Threadbanger, a weekly internet video show, teaches viewers how to make cool do-it-yourself fas.h.i.+on with young designers. See also BurdaStyle.com's open-source sewing from the German publis.h.i.+ng empire Burda, which decided to take copyrights off its dress patterns and invite the public to use them, adapt them, create their own, and share them. The site is filled with patterns, how-to's, and discussion. Springwise reported that SANS, a small New York label, stopped selling its. .h.i.t $85 square s.h.i.+rt in 2008 and then released the pattern. For $6, you get the pattern, which you print out at home, and a SANS label to sew inside. Opening the design is a nice idea but I can't sew. So craftsmen could build a business out of making SANS or Burda designs on order, as some are doing, selling them on Etsy, a site filled with unique, handmade items, which has been the store for more than 100,000 sellers since 2005.

OK, consumable goods, gadgets, and fas.h.i.+on could be Googlified. But what about Google TP? Surely it is not possible to bring Googlethink to toilet paper. There won't be communities around toilet paper. I shudder to imagine TP 2.0 after seeing a commercial for toilet paper whose USP (unique selling proposition) is that it doesn't leave little paper bits on your b.u.t.t. Boy, that must have been a tough sales conference. I can't think of a better reason for advertising not to exist.

As with newspapers, perhaps it's time for the TP industry to get out of the paper business and ask what business it is really in. Cleanliness, right? When I was in Davos, what amazed me almost as much as hanging out with heads of state and industry was seeing an automated, self-cleaning toilet seat in the conference center. After flus.h.i.+ng, a motorized arm comes out and grabs the seat, cleaning it as it rotates. It's mesmerizing. I took video of it to share on YouTube. (Google "Davos toilet" for my video. Or for a more entertaining if politically incorrect demonstration, search on YouTube for "Swedish toilet seat Gizmodo"). The company that makes that product is not in the paper business. It's in the clean-seat business.

Toto, a j.a.panese plumbing manufacturer, has decided that the business is neither paper nor clean seats but clean b.u.ms and happiness. Toto invented the Washlet automated, computerized toilet seat, a marvel of technology that heats the seat to a cozy 110 degrees and spritzes you with warm, clean water after you've done your business. Then it dries you with gentle, warm air even as it magically eliminates odors. (On YouTube, search for "Toto Washlet FlushTV" to see a demonstration by W. Hodding Carter IV, son of the former Carter administration official and author of Flushed: How the Plumber Saved Civilization Flushed: How the Plumber Saved Civilization.) Before you laugh, know that Toto has sold 17 million Washlets (they advertised on my Buzzmachine with smiley faces superimposed on naked, happy, clean b.u.t.ts). The Toto is hot on YouTube with videos that have tens, even hundreds of thousands of views. Hollywood actor Will Smith has bragged on TV that he has the deluxe, $5,000 model and doesn't spend a dollar on TP. Here we have the perfect convergence of problem and solution, hardware and software, technology and life with bottom-up marketing. This is the post-TP Googley toilet.

Even in atom-based enterprises, the connections the internet makes possible can bring business benefits. No end of consumer products would be helped from a more open conversation: tool makers listening to craftsmen, cooking-utensil companies opening up to cooks, athletic equipment companies watching out for what athletes and trainers want. One should find opportunities to make more targeted products and to partner with customers to design, support, and sell products. Google and the internet change everything, even factories.

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