What Is Google's Real Mission? It Certainly Had A Clear Mission Statement! - Steve Blacker

1. Google defines its mission as "to organize the world's information," not to possess it or accumulate it. Yet Google possesses an unlimited and daily expanding trove of information regarding the interests and behavior of, approximately, everyone. In less than a decade Google has made itself a global brand bigger than Coca Cola or GE.

2. Google has created more wealth faster than any company in history; it dominates the information economy unlike any other competitor.

3. In 2004 Sergey Brin said about his hopes for Google: "It will be included in people's brains. Ultimately I view Google as a way to augment your brain with knowledge of the world." Added Larry Page: "When you think about something and don't really know much about it, you will automatically get information. Eventually you'll have the implant, where if you think about a fact, it will just tell you the answer." 4. In 2004, Google was still a private company, five years old, already worth $25 billion and handling about 85 percent of Internet searches. Its single greatest innovation was the algorithm called Page Rank. Page Rank is a probability distribution, and the calculation is recursive, each page's rank depending on the ranks of pages that depend… and so on.

5. The Google approach was to trust the Web and its numerous links, for better and for worse. Stickiness is still the most desired metric in websites and Google owns it in spades.

6. The mission statement of Google was unique in that it not only encompassed the Internet but all the world's books and images too. It also offered more gigabytes than anyone else and by an extremely high margin of thousands to one.

7. Today Google continues to be relentless in driving computer science forward and rather then rest on its laurels it invests heavily in creating new platforms and brand extensions. Google's new mind-reading type-ahead feature, Google Instant, has to date saved users over 100 billion keystrokes. For example if you are seeking information about the Gobi Desert, you receive results well before you type the word "desert".

8. Google avoided using conventional marketing; their attitude seemed to be that Google would market itself. Google was a verb and a meme. Google has already transformed the information economy. They understood before anyone else that the merchandise of the information economy is not information; it is attention. These commodities have an inverse relationship. When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.

9. Google's business today is not search but advertising. More than 96 percent of its $29 billion in revenue last year came directly from advertising, and most of the rest came from advertising related services. Google makes more from advertising than all the nation's newspapers combined!

10. While Google's corporate motto is "Don't be evil", which the founders interpreted to mean: "Don't be like Microsoft i.e. don't be ruthless, take-no-prisoners monopolistic"; it is interesting to note that their corporate mascot is a replica of a Tyrannosaurus Rex a terrifying predator. Or that Chairman Eric Schmidt's office chair is a B-52 bomber chair. The B-52 was a long range bomber designed to deliver nuclear weapons.

Steve's most recent book You Can't Fall Off The Floor - The Insiders' Guide to Re-Inventing Yourself and Your Career chronicles his 50 year career working for over 25 different companies with 189 lessons learned and insider tips from Gayle King, Cathie Black, Chuck Townsend and 28 others; Blacker is still going strong today as a partner in Frankfurt & Blacker Solutions, LLC. His web site is blacker-reinventions.com and e-mail address is blackersolutions@aol.com

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