Three Questions for Ken Auletta
Ken Auletta, the author of New York Times best-seller Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, will speak at the Information Industry Summit on January 26th. In preparation for his remarks, Ken recently answered a few questions on the minds of digital content industry leaders in relation to Google.
SIIA: In Googled, you write that Google CEO Eric Schmidt said his company could be the first $100 billion media company. Has Google evolved from a search business into a media business, or was this their plan all along?
KA: Google has not followed a diabolical plan to conquer all media. When Google was born in 1998, the vision of the founders was to build a search engine to gather all the world’s information. Only later, after Google began to successfully sell ads in late 2001, did they come to realize that Google could become a media company. When Schmidt speaks of becoming the first $100 billion company, to achieve this goal he knows that Google must succeed with YouTube, cloud computing, and its Android operating system for smart phones. Each, like its search engine, disrupts traditional media businesses.
SIIA: In your book, you focus a lot on how everything Google does is driven by a relentless engineering perspective. Is this the one factor that separates Google from the media and content industries? Is it hopeless to think the media and content industries could evolve in this way?
KA: Traditional media companies have legacies to defend. They are not free, as Google is, to invent because they fear the new will weaken the old. And they lack both the engineering talent of Google, and an appreciation that in the digital world the engineer is often the creator and must be liberated, pampered like a King.
SIIA: Schmidt recently responded to privacy concerns with Google’s data collection, saying “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” Is Google redefining the limits of privacy? Is privacy shaping up to be the one issue that turns the public against them?
KA: Google and Facebook and a host of digital companies are redefining privacy. This is a development advertisers usually like, because the more they know about consumers the better they can target their ads. The danger for companies like Google is that consumers — and government — will become alarmed at the mountain of data Google has assembled. If so alarmed, Google would lose their most vital asset: the trust they’ve earned from users.
Have a question for Ken? If you can’t join us at the Information Industry Summit, e-mail your questions to jcrosby@siia.net and we’ll add them to the list for the Q&A after his speech.
