Web 2.0 Event
Eric Schmidt headlined the Web 2.0 Expo today in San Francisco. He was queried in a punchy and intimate manner by the moderator, John Battelle, in an on-stage interview. John is no stranger to Google, of course. Though several books have been written about the company, John’s is the definitive work. Not your run of the mill corporate biography, John’s account is a more ambitious effort to bubble-up a level and put the company within an industry and societal perspective. He also follows the company via Searchblog http://battellemedia.com/ and is a mainstay of the Google ecosystem through editorial events like the Expo where he is often paired with the Google triumvirate.
The on-stage interview was entertaining and balanced. The most informative segment came when Eric stated Google’s four high level spaces or focus areas. I don’t think he was referring to product lines or markets. Instead, it seemed be a more abstracted commentary on the biggest buckets in which to sort everything else the company does.
The four areas he specified were advertising, organizing the world’s information, human capital [management] and collaboration. The second and fourth items are clearly product lines. The first is also a product area though not one that is exposed to consumers; naturally, these include advertising tools and programs availed to the marketing community. The third category is clearly an organizational competency, so it would involve methodologies, processes, systems, know-how, etc.
What a nice little vignette into the company. Given Google’s penchant for fresh-thinking and the large scope of activities encompassed in the four buckets, the implications are significant. It’s not hard to imagine the company churning out dozens of big ideas that come to define not only consumer experiences and digital living but also industrial organization, the economics of competition, management practices, corporate governance and innovation theory.
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