What Would Google Do? at Dominant Systems Book Store

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.)
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Customer Reviews & Comments
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?) Jeff Jarvits explains how Google is so successful by: 1. being free 2. acting fast 3. allowing customers to decide (thereby eliminating the third party or agent) 4. providing the most prevalent links based on their ranking ("Googlejuice") 5. etc... The author gives numerous examples of successful companies which employ similar tactics such as etsy, craigslist, and Amazon. He describes various reasons why these tactics work. The author certainly elaborates on enough strategies that make Google and others like Google online successes; however, the text drags on endlessly and in a somewhat unorganized fashion that I felt he was verbally vomiting. It was like reading an endless blog instead of a book. If found myself repeatedly asking these two questions: 1. What did I just read? 2. What information did I get out of reading this? In summary, a person who is thinking of embarking on a net presence will probably find that there's enough material in this book to guide them into doing what Google does. However, since the text rambles on, that person will have to jot down important details as he or she reads in order to remember it. If the book were better organized, more concise and definitive in its evaluation of what Google and others like Google do, and had a clearer table of contents (chapter headings), I would have rated it four stars.

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