I Know, I Know. But This Post *Is* About Search and Google, So All Is Well At SearchBlog.

I hear you all. What is Battelle on about, all this music stuff, all this non search stuff? I am sorry, but you have to trust me, it's going somewhere. I'm following a hunch, of a sorts.

Today some bankers from Piper Jaffrey came by, and they asked me the same question I was asked by two or three reporters who were writing pieces on Google's 10th anniversary. (When is it, anyway? I am sure it's this year, depending on how you count...).

Anyway, the question is this: So what's next? What might unseat Google?

I find the question interesting, mainly for its lack of historical perspective. The answer, I think, is pretty damn easy.

No company will unseat Google (though ultimately, one company will get credit).

Culture will. Unquestionably, inevitably, Google will be surpassed by a cultural shift it will be incapable of exploiting. And that will be OK.

Why am I so certain of this? Well, history, for one. And my own experience, for the other.

Allow me to explain.

It's my theory that world-changing companies occur when one and only one thing happens: Our culture shifts its relationship to technology. It's a complex set of parameters that allow for such a shift, but it's happened three times in my professional life:

1. IBM and DOS. This is when computers became accessible to determined early adopters, and a democratized culture of digital information storage and retrieval began.

2. Microsoft and Windows. As much as I'd like to give this to Steve and the Mac OS, the winner was Gates and Windows. This is when we went from speaking the arcane language of computerese (.exe? .bat?) to the language of "hunt and poke" via a visual interface. A major step forward in how culture relates to information, and therefore, to itself.

3. Google and search. As I have argued many times, search is our latest interface to information, and it's one based on natural language, albeit typed words, rather than spoken.

So, what might be #4?

Isn't that the hundred billion dollar question?

I have (my own) pretty clear answer to that. Happy to tell you. But I have to write the post I promised here first. Damn. I really miss having the time to write....

Who Stole The Mojo?.

Perks defined Google for years, and defined most Silicon Valley culture as well. Microsoft has been famous for its perks since the early 90s, in fact. So when a number of posts, sparked by a NYT article (now nearly two months old) claim that the era of perks is over at Google, it prompts musings such as this one in ComputerWorld, claiming Google has lost its mojo.

I'm not sure that's true, at least not yet. Perhaps amongst IT managers, that's true (ComputerWorld being an IT publication, after all), but I am not sure IT managers ever had more than a passing interest in Google's "mojo" to begin with.

The piece is entirely anecdotal, so the conclusion must be as well. For now, the jury is out.

Watch Ubiquity.

I am.

Links, Etc..

Friday linkday:

Via Churbuck, a nice walkthrough of how to use Google search tools to understand site acquisition and traffic patterns.

As long as we're in a learning mode, here's a post on using FriendFeed as a business tool.

The IE8 beta is out. I need to grok this. It's got some stuff in it that effects the advertising ecosystem in serious ways that I have yet to grok, and am not seeing much coverage of. More at Forbes and Ed Bott.

Mashable reports on a bucket of money for JumpTap, a competitor in the mobile search arena, an area I am increasingly finding interesting.

Like reggae? Me too. Given it's Friday, check out Steel Pulse via BBtv.

The Google Alphabet.

Brady reprises the Google Alphabet (the first word auto-populated by the newly integrated Google Suggest for each letter in the alphabet).

New Post at Amex Blog: Marketing as Product Development.

This latest post is some sketching for a longer riff I'm eager to dig into. I love the fact that I can do sketch out loud thanks to American Express. Here's the first few grafs:

Over the past several posts I’ve been talking about the role of search, conversation, and media in your business. While not explicit, each of these posts was about one thing: Marketing.

Marketing is one of the most misunderstood practices in business today. For most of us, marketing is about convincing potential customers that our product or service is worth their money. And while that’s certainly party true, it never struck me as the whole narrative.

Where does marketing really begin? As management guru Peter Drucker stated it, “Marketing is the whole business seen from the customer’s point of view.” Put another way, every single interaction the customer has with your business can and should be seen as marketing.

I’ve argued elsewhere than a truly successful business is one that is an ongoing conversation. Those conversations are marketing – if you add value and connect to your customer, you’re succeeding. If you don’t, you fail.

It’s easy to know if you’re succeeding while having those conversations – we’re all pretty good at sensing when customers are happy as we directly interact with them. But we often forget a crucial ongoing conversation that usually occurs beyond our personal presence: The conversation between the customer and our products.

Chrome: This Is Web OS, Make No Mistake.

Why launch Chrome (Google's new "browser") when Firefox, Google's favored son, is doing so well? Because Google needs its own. Using a comic book to introduce it is fun, and certainly, there's always room for new approaches to platform and interface, and Chrome looks to have a lot of neat new features and a fresh approach. But what this really tells us is that Google is dead serious about the distribution business, for one, and dead serious about the operating system business, for another. Reading through the book, I am struck by how similar the language is to traditional operating system overviews. Multithreading, stable development platforms, etc. etc.

With the IE 8 in beta, and Firefox going strong, it looks to be a good season for innovation on the Web.

Oh, and By The Way, We're Also Taking Over the Media Business.

Make no mistake about it.

I Was Wondering ... Matt Answers.

I was wondering what data was sent to Google from Chrome users. Matt has the answers, and so far, seems innocuous.

Here's A Book I Want to Read (And Wish I Could Write).

An Anthropology of Google's Search Experiments (with all data exposed, of course).

Never will happen, but we get some tantalizing hints in this post on the Google blog:

At any given time, we run anywhere from 50 to 200 experiments on Google sites all over the world. I'll start by describing experimental changes so small that you can barely tell the difference after staring at the page, and end with a couple of much more visually obvious experiments that we have run. There are a lot of people dedicated to detecting everything Google changes - and occasionally, things imagined that we did not do! - and they do latch on to a lot of our more prominent experiments. But the experiments with smaller changes are almost never noticed.

Google: The Ten Years Stories.

In the past two weeks nearly every press outlet on the planet has called me asking for thoughts on where Google is going and how Google got to where it is. The reason? Google turns 10 years old, according to most estimates, this weekend.

I've talked to as many folks as I can (after all I was a journalist covering technology for quite some time) but I did have to turn down a few given how busy life gets after the summer holidays. In any case, I'll post links to all the Ten Year stories I find here (not just ones I'm quoted in!), starting with the Daily Telegraph in London:

Ten years of Google - Telegraph

Spin Around Google's Decade - BBC

Google Looks to the Next 10 Years - Also BBC

Google reigns as world’s most powerful 10-year-old - Boston Herald/AP

Happy Birthday, Google - Marketplace Radio

Wither Google As It Turns Ten? - CBS Early Show (yeah, that's me)

Google Ten Years From Now - Guardian

A World Without Google - Technologizer

Google At Ten - Om

The Today Show - (Yeah, that's me too)

Twitter Bios Should Not Be NoFollowed! Updated: Whuffie Me.

I agree with Rae!

Update: Matt Cutts responds here.

The spam issue is a real one for all social applications, which includes search, of course. But I hate the baby with the bathwater approaches. I think we need to get to the next level of validation with social media - we need to start getting more granular. As humans, we're pretty good at weeding out who is a normal person worthy of whuffie, and who is a skeezy slimeball out to take advantage. Can't we do the same on Twitter?!

Google Says: We'll Get Our Own Data, Thanks.

Not content to lease data from others who have satellites, Google today launched its own satellite into space. Via BeetTv, thanks Andy.

Talk about web meets world....this is yet another indicator of the integration of virtual and physical. And it brings Google one step closer to what I think could be the company's Waterloo - a viral meme that Google is sensing too much, knows too much, and is too powerful. It may not be rational, but no one ever accused humans of being entirely rational.

Update: Apparently Google does not own the satellite, just the data....

Ambient Awareness.

Oh, I've kinda heard of that. Sounds familiar. Think I saw it somewhere, at some point.

From the NYT piece:

This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.

The Web IS an OS. Get Over It..

There is always a backlash against anyone calling anything the Web OS, mainly because, as folks point out quite accurately, the term "operating system" technically applies to the stack on top of PC hardware that interfaces between that hardware and a user's intentions.

Here's an example of what I mean - A Web OS? Are You Dense? In this story, the author, who I don't know but I certainly do respect, gives Arrington a ton of shit for "not knowing anything about computers." Well, color me dense because, yes, in fact, there is a Web OS, and it will be built on top of the Windows/Mac/PC OS, and that's just fine with me, because I could care less about technical purist theories of what an OS is. I don't care if it's built on top of Windows, which is a "classic OS". In fact, Windows, as I recall, was built on top of DOS for most of its career, so what does that make Windows? Not an OS? And DOS was built on top of some arcane machine language, I am sure. And we can keep dancing on the head of definitional pins, but to me....

To me, operating systems are computer-mediated realities that help us get stuff done. And to my mind, that makes Chrome an OS. A system that let's me operate shit. End of story.