Aaron Goldman and I agree -- it's time for Google to rethink its mission statement. But we disagree on
the reason. Goldman thinks it's time "to call a spade a spade" and for Google to come clean on their intention to grab as many ad dollars as possible. From this perspective, the change in the mission
statement is really just to better align it with Google's business.
I think "organizing the world's information" needs to be changed for a different reason. I think there are inherent
limitations in it that may seriously impact Google's revenue stream in the future.
A Quick Update
But first, some background. Eric Schmidt has moved into that
corporate limbo called "executive chairman"-ship. I don't really know what an executive chairman does. I asked Google and it's also pretty fuzzy on the concept. According to Schmidt, it's to focus on
external partnerships and to "advise" Larry and Sergey. To me, it sounds like a long and polite good-bye. Whatever we know about the shift, I guarantee there's more to the story.
Also,
Google rocked expectations on Q4 earnings, so all appears to be rosy in Google-world. But quarterly earnings calls are a notoriously poor indicator of the strategic health of an organization. They
reflect the success of strategic decisions made a year or two ago and the ability of the organization to execute against them. They tell you nothing about the strategy today, or how the company may do
in the future. Which brings us back to the mission statement.
Missionary Work
Organizing the world's information sounds like a lofty goal, and it is. It was entirely appropriate
given the "wild-west" nature of the Web when Google first appeared in 1997. But on the Web, information equals data, and data comes in two forms: structured and unstructured. Google's mission was
defined at a time when almost everything online was unstructured. It was a mess. It needed to be organized. And Google's revenue model sprung from its ability to match consumer intent with all this
unstructured content. It was a broad-based attempt to tame the Web, and it was tremendously successful.
But the success came with limitations. If you're going to try to organize
unstructured information, you have to rely on some method to interpret the meaning of the information. You need some framework to organize information into. Google, like every other engine, relied on
language as a measure of relevance -- specifically matching content to a query made up of keywords. But language is notoriously difficult for machines to get right, because it's ambiguous. Consider
that words like "set," "cut" and "break" can be defined in close to 100 different ways. Google's struggle for the past decade and a half has been dealing with the difficulties of organizing
unstructured data.
Another challenge is trying to deal with all unstructured data in the same interface. Google has tried to meet the challenge by incorporating more and more content
categories into the main results page. There are currently more than a dozen categories you could conduct your search in. The elegance of the one-size-fits-all engine is rapidly becoming clunky and
awkward.
The Colonization of the Web
Over the same time that Google has been pursuing its mission, the Web has become economically colonized. Where there's an
opportunity to make a buck, there is motivation to move data into a more structured format. Pockets of economically viable data have become increasing structured in the past 10 years, including all
travel categories, books, movies, music and many commonly purchased products. Increasingly, we're going to see this colonization, which will organize information in a way that Google could never do
"on-the-fly." And as this data becomes more structured, it allows for a different interaction with it. Data becomes more functional and more useful. It moves from conducting a search to using an
application. Think of the difference between trying to plan a trip using nothing but Google -- and planning the same trip using Kayak. That's the difference between dealing with unstructured and
structured data.
This colonization will hit Google where it hurts most -- the highest volume, most commercially relevant searches. At this point, Google still acts as a navigational path
to these structured destinations, but this is a transitional band-aid at best. The Web is growing up and it's being tamed in bits and pieces; not by Google's algorithmic wizardry but by commercial
opportunities.
Google is right to focus on the possibilities of mobile. More and more of our online activity will happen there. But mobile is not a new frontier, it's simply a new view into
the same landscape. It will leverage the same colonies of structured data. In fact, the mobile use-case is perfectly suited to dealing with structured data. It will accelerate the colonization.
Google's concept of "organizing" falls short of our end goal, which is using information to do things with. If I were Google, I'd be doing some wordsmithing using words like "useful" and
"functional."