What Would Google Do?

The Central Argument: Platform Thinking as a Worldview

Jeff Jarvis is not, in the end, writing a book about Google. He is writing a book about a particular mode of organizing value in the world, and he uses Google as the clearest existing specimen of that mode. The central argument is this: the internet has permanently inverted the logic of industrial-age institutions, and the organizations that survive the inversion will be those that embrace openness, networks, and the empowerment of their users rather than clinging to control, scarcity, and the old asymmetries of expertise. Google, in Jarvis’s reading, is less a company than a proof of concept for a new institutional grammar.

What makes this argument necessary is the historical moment it addresses. Written in 2009, the book arrives at a peculiar inflection point — print journalism is visibly collapsing, television is beginning its long adolescent crisis, and every legacy industry is staring into the same algorithmic abyss. Jarvis watched these industries flounder and noticed that their leaders kept asking the wrong question. They asked how to protect their existing structures rather than how to rebuild around new possibilities. The right question, he insists, is not “how do we survive Google?” but “how do we think like Google?”

The Key Insights, Taken Seriously

The most intellectually generative idea in the book is what Jarvis calls the “link economy.” The logic runs something like this: in an attention-scarce environment, the scarce resource is not content but relevance, and relevance is conferred by other people pointing at you. This means that giving things away — distributing freely, linking outward, ceding control of your content — is not a sacrifice but a strategy. Abundance, not scarcity, becomes the mechanism of value creation. The publisher who withholds content behind a wall is not protecting value; he is destroying the conditions under which value accrues.

This is genuinely counterintuitive if you were trained in industrial-era economics, and Jarvis deserves credit for pressing it hard. The insight connects deeply to the economics of network goods: the value of being in a network rises with the number of participants, which means that exclusivity is often self-defeating. What looks like generosity in the link economy is actually rational network-building.

A second major insight is the “small is the new big” principle — the idea that the internet enables niche aggregates to outperform mass markets in both efficiency and intimacy. Rather than broadcasting one message to a million people, the winning strategy is to serve specific communities with specificity and precision. Google itself earns its billions not by selling to everyone identically but by matching the right advertisement to the right query at the right moment. The mass-market model assumed that you had to blur your message to reach enough people; the networked model allows you to sharpen it and still find your audience.

Perhaps the most provocative claim is what Jarvis calls the “publicness” imperative — the idea that transparency and openness are not just ethically preferable but competitively superior. Companies that let users see inside them, that admit errors publicly, that co-create products with their communities, build trust asymmetrically faster than companies that maintain institutional opacity. The closed corporate voice, carefully managed by communications departments, reads as evasion in an era of universal connectivity.

Adjacent Fields and Deeper Resonances

The argument resonates with Clay Shirky’s contemporaneous thinking about cognitive surplus and the reorganization of collective action, and it anticipates much of what Yochai Benkler had already formalized in “The Wealth of Networks.” There is also a strong family resemblance to the open-source software philosophy — the idea that distributed contribution, even by strangers with mixed motives, can produce outputs that no centralized team could match. What Jarvis contributes is the willingness to push this logic aggressively into domains — hospitals, schools, governments, car manufacturers — where the rhetoric of openness had not yet arrived with full force.

The book also brushes, without quite naming it, against the principal-agent literature in economics. Legacy institutions suffer from what might be called an alignment crisis: their internal incentives push managers toward protecting existing revenue rather than cannibalizing it for a better future model. Google’s structural advantage, in this reading, is partly cultural — it attracts people who genuinely prefer building new things to defending old ones. That cultural selection effect is harder to replicate than any particular product decision.

There is a tension worth sitting with, however. Jarvis’s enthusiasm for platform openness occasionally slides past the question of who captures the value in platform economies. Google is extraordinarily open — and extraordinarily profitable, largely because it sits at the node through which everyone else’s openness flows. The link economy creates value broadly but concentrates rents narrowly. This critique would sharpen considerably in the decade following the book’s publication, as platform monopolism became a legitimate political concern.

Why It Still Matters

Reading this book now is a strange exercise in temporal dislocation. Many of its prescriptions have been vindicated, absorbed, and then complicated by subsequent events. The industries Jarvis exhorted to open up did open up, and some were swallowed whole by the platforms they were urged to emulate. And yet the underlying intellectual move — asking what the logic of a new environment actually demands, rather than what feels comfortable — remains the right first question for any institution confronting structural change. Jarvis’s real contribution is not a recipe but an orientation: the willingness to follow the logic of a new medium wherever it leads, even when it leads away from everything you previously built.