Recently in The death of marketing Category

Google recently scored an extra point in the "Not Evil" column when they announced they're essentially leaving China.

But what else can Google do? Let's take a page from one of Roger von Oech's Creative Whack cards, and play the "What If" game. What if Google had no ads? And not just the ads on the right-hand side of search results. What if they also had no AdSense ads that appear on the publishers that Google inevitably sends you to as well?

Bob Pritchett wrote:

There's an opportunity here to create a web search engine that punishes results littered with ads. Google can't do it - they live off those ads. A site that took ads but didn't have an incentive to send you to other sites full of them could offer a superior experience. (via)

If you turn the clock back to 1998, this is precisely what Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to do. They outlined this exact issue in a paper they presented as part of their Ph.D. requirements:

Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media, we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

(via Googled by Ken Auletta)

There was a point, maybe five years ago, when it seemed like everybody had positive things to say about Google's search engine. Now when they refer to it, it's often to imply that it's a necessary evil. And when you have such massive and widespread frustration, that points to an equally massive opportunity for a new upstart.

But which startup will fill the vacuum? Bill Gates famously once said that the competitors he worried about the most were a couple kids in a garage. But who would be the equivalent "kids in a garage" to Google?

This is a hard post to write because I have friends in marketing. Having said that, the big picture is that the majority of people dislike marketing. It's something they put up with. That's partly why I've always felt uneasy doing marketing. It has always been a chore for me, a necessary evil. I was being rewarded for how much I could get in people's faces about my products. Probably the only reason marketing guru Seth Godin is palpable to me, is because he engages in a clever doublethink, wherein making excellent products is marketing.

If the App Store had its golden days, it was between apps 1-10,000. Back then, no marketing was required. Good apps surfaced immediately, and for a while I thought that somehow, Apple broke the formula completely. A solo developer who was skilled enough could get rewarded directly by the market in proportion to how good their App actually was.

Today, as a person who interviews iPhone developers every day, I see many brilliant programmers who tried to hack it in the App Store, but were blocked out because they couldn't hack it in marketing.

This seems somehow unfair or a situation that if improved, would be for the better good. Does the march of progress mean that those golden days could be permanent? That marketing could becomes unecessary?

I used to enjoying reading AdBusters, and one time they put together a portfolio of billboards that were torn down, revealing beautiful blue skies. A few years later:

On January 1, 2007, Sao Paulo's rightwing populist mayor made a striking proclamation: no outdoor advertising anywhere in the city. Suddenly, the city of 11 million people had no visible billboards, illegal street posters, kiosk ads, or neon signs -- not even the Goodyear Blimp could pass muster. " Within months," as On the Media put it, "the city has gone from a Blade Runner-like vision of the future to a reclaimed past." The "visual pollution," in the mayor's words, was erased. The imagery, captured in a Flickr pool, is truly amazing.

The Nexus One launch yesterday was really interesting when you compare it to the way Apple markets. So, rewind back, and it was around a month ago that Google simply gave its employees a Nexus One as a Christmas present and then permitted them to tweet about it. Then a few top bloggers were given review copies of it. And then there was a launch yesterday. That's it. No heavy marketing buys. No complex hype machine.

The big "what if" then, is what if this beats the iPhone? What if this strategy prevails over the Apple reality distortion field?

I'm reading Ken Auletta's book Googled, and he describes Google, for better or for worse, as being all about engineering. For example, some top designers have quit Google in frustration because design ideas based on intuition and holistic thinking get overridden by usability and focus tests. It's numbers over moxie. The engineers are running the mad house, and my guess is they override marketing as well. When you think of Google, you probably don't think about them for their stellar marketing.

Or maybe you do, but it's the kind of marketing that Seth Godin promotes, wherein you make your products so extraordinary, that they market themselves.

But taking that a step further, what if that's more than just a strategy, but an actual representation of where industry is going? In an ideal world, with efficient markets, nobody would need to tell you about their products. The good products would already be known. What if ten years from now, Godin's strategy is the only way to market your products, by investing in stellar product development.

If you step back and take the broad view of technology, you'll see that one thing it does well is cut out the middlemen. It nixes all the people in between the product and the customer. That has been Dell's strategy with its trademarked "Be Direct" slogan. And that is what the Internet has been doing all along.