When I see the word "creative"... I reach for the next web link...

Not a good sign for Google... the guy talks about helping "creative" ideas get "more digital"... deep thinking from the "beau monde" of brand mastery and world domination... :)

• Posted by: Emil Sotirov
• January 20, 2008 2:02 PM

John, I saw your post referenced by David Churbuck. I was there for the conversation that Ad Age references - you might find the rest of it interesting. http://www.beingpeterkim.com/2008/01/read-between-th.html

• Posted by: Peter Kim
• January 20, 2008 4:21 PM

His job is to explain the motivations and things Google is doing in language everyone can understand. The company's mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." "It's less competitive than it is aspirational, but it needs lots of translation," he said.

Well, he'd better get to work and start translating because Google's brand doesn't really make much sense to me anymore. These days, I see very little organizing and a lot of consumer application engineering -- of the types of consumer applications being built by pretty much every other company out there. Chat clients, office software, cell phones, etc. Oh, and iGoogle customized themes, to make everything pretty.

I look at those things and I really don't know what Google wants to be, what its brand is. It has really lost me. A few days ago, Ionut Alex Chitu even reported that content-based searching is deactivated by default in the newest version of Google Desktop Search. Search is Google's core mission. Search is the name of the software application (GDS). And yet search is now deactivated, by default.

What's the brand strategy in that, I wonder?

• Posted by: JG
• January 20, 2008 6:20 PM

Why is content-based searching deactivated in Google Desktop by default? Because Vista has its own that you can't turn off. Microsoft won that battle, even though Google won the web search in IE7 battle. Since web search brings in revenue for Google and desktop search does not, ... draw your own conclusions.

• Posted by: Hiroko
• January 20, 2008 7:39 PM

Because Vista has its own that you can't turn off. Microsoft won that battle

Huh? Did I completely miss that news? The last I'd heard, Google won that battle. Microsoft agreed to let you choose another desktop search. Was there a follow-up to this story that I missed?

And Chitu says this happens on "Windows", not on Vista only. So the argument about not being able to turn Microsoft Desktop Search off isn't really relevant on XP.. because it doesn't exist in the same way that it does on Vista. So why would Google also turn it off on XP?

Still, my main point is that I'm very confused about the Google brand right now. I don't know what they are, nor what they are trying to be. I don't think I'm alone. It seems like most of Silicon Valley is trying to figure out what business Google is really in.

• Posted by: JG
• January 20, 2008 8:54 PM

thanks flowers

• Posted by: çiçek
• January 21, 2008 1:24 AM