Battelle: Google No Longer Knows What Its Brand Means
I’ve borrowed the above image from Battelle’s recent post at Searchblog. It nicely conveys the point that:
“Google, once the ‘pencil’ of the Internet, has become a newer, more open version of Microsoft, and it has to admit as much both to itself as well as to its public, or it will start to lose credibility with all its constituents.”
Pencil, in this case, is short-hand for a company that does one thing — and only one thing — enormously well. Google = Search. Now Google makes cellphones, browsers, mobile OSes and office productivity applications. Kind of like Microsoft.
Or Apple, but I think Battelle is intentional in calling Google the new Microsoft. Because while Apple makes laptops, mobile and desktop OSes, browsers and cellphones (not to mention music players, ecommerce platforms and retail experiences), it has retained an intense, control-freaky focus on what its brand means. Asked why Google isn’t doing any brand advertising right now, like all its competitors are, Battelle answers:
“Google isn’t doing brand advertising because Google doesn’t know what its brand means…. [And] Until Google figures out what its brand means in a post search world, it won’t be doing any brand advertising. And given who its competing with — Apple, Hulu, Microsoft and Amazon, among many others — I’m not sure that’s a good thing.”










