Interactive Knowhow

It’s a bright, sunny afternoon at the Googleplex, Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California.

In between the white and glass buildings that house the offices, swathes of green grass and neatly trimmed hedges offer relaxing spaces to chill out or eat lunch in. Red, blue and yellow umbrellas and seating add a Google-branded completeness to the landscape.

Every so often a Googler speeds past on a bright yellow JacMac Scooter, off to the next meeting or, possibly, one of Google’s many free talks – maybe a ‘Google University’ lecture, a “TechTalk” or an Authors@Google seminar (this week it’s Sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson).

You won’t see many cars here. But there is space for nearly 2,000 of them underground. The 26 acre Googleplex includes public trails and a 5 acre public park – a spirit of space and leisure pervades.

I’m looking out on all this from the corner cafeteria of “Building 47”, where I’m sitting with Matt Glotzbach, Product Management Director, Google Enterprise. Even indoors, it’s impossible to forget where you are. Red, green, blue and yellow prevails – cups, plates, noticeboards, chairs and, even, lava lamps.

With all the buzz around Chrome and Android, it’s hard to imagine that just a few years ago, when Matt started, Google didn’t do “apps”. Search and advertising (AdWords and AdSense) were the only products.

“Enterprise has always been in the strategy. It got delayed because of the ad side going stratospheric. Now there’s been a refocus. Enterprise is the second largest business at Google, behind the ads. And I like to say that we’re going to create the second ‘large’ business.”

Indeed, if Google Enterprise produces anything even half as successful as Adwords (which generated $16.4billion revenue in 2007), Matt and his colleagues will no doubt be very happy bunnies.

“There’s a culmination of events that make this the right time for apps,” says Matt. “Internet connectivity is almost ubiquitous, and cloud computing has hit a maturity point”

Ah yes, the cloud. Although there are disadvantages (see Bill Thompson’s piece on security), cloud computing is seen by many as the next big leap forward for the internet industry. And if the cloud is where the action is going to be for the foreseeable future, Google has an enviable share of it.

Google certainly seems to exemplify what Marco Iansiti and Roy Levien describe as the “keystone advantage” – this term is taken directly from biological ecosystems where “keystone” species are those that maintain the healthy functioning of the entire system because their own survival depends on it. Google is positioned not only to help foster the health of the system, its lynchpin role means that it benefits more than most from that system’s good health.

“Because every transaction is performed through the Google platform, the company has perfect, continuous awareness of, and access to, by-product information and is the hub of all germinal revenue streams. There’s no need for Google to do market surveys and statistical analyses to forecast trends in the ecosystem; the information is already in Google’s database.” (Iyer, Bala & Davenport, Thomas H., Reverse Engineering Google’s Innovation Machine, Harvard Business Review Article, 1 April 2008, pp.5-6)

See also Umair Haque’s recent piece on Chrome for a great analysis of the inclusive strategy of the launch behind Google’s new browser.

This full use of network effects helps make Google a definitive “web 2.0” company.

Furthermore, Google is in the enviable position of being seen as trustworthy by its users, as it doesn’t need to do anything underhand to obtain this invaluable information. Unlike other large monopolistic companies, Google is unusual in that it is generally liked and respected by its user base (“if we ever lost user confidence, we’d cease to exist in a very short time”, agrees Matt).

As for that “keystone” position, Matt nods his head: “We’ve become a big brand, a household name. We’re a mainstay, a staple, in all our users lives.”

This pole position in the ecosystem has another core advantage – Google has a continued ability to attract key talent:

“The team here are fantastic. In any company, there’s always a risk the team will get watered down but, if anything, the opposite seems to have happened here. The company has grown enormously since I arrived – we’ve gone from 2,000 to 20,000 in four years.”

Like many successful companies, Google has a notoriously drawn out hiring process. The company has to make absolutely sure that any new hires are going to be absolutely right for the fast-paced, intensively innovative environment – and help sustain Google’s competitive advantage into the future:

“It’s tempting to hire people with a long history of success but you can’t tell what the world will look like in five years time.”

Today, says Matt, Google’s sheer weight of users and its advertising income combine to enable it to watch – and follow – virtually every trend on the horizon. The business looks – at this stage – invincible.

With policies such as the “20% rule” (where developers spend 20% of their time working on their own projects – Gmail came out of this) and the famous “do no evil” mission statement, both part of the culture from day one, Google proves itself to be a textbook innovator.

“One of the things embodied at Google is empowerment,” says Matt. “A governance model and corporate structure do exist, but their impact is subtle. People want to be empowered and Google is lucky: we got to start out [offering empowerment] and then maintain it as we got bigger.”

And Matt is finding that his enterprise clients now want that sort of ‘flavour’ as part of their IT infrastructure:

“This Millennial Generation – Generation Y – grew up with openness and sharing as values. Now we’re seeing the other side of that – companies want to bring Google apps into their businesses – because their Generation Y employees are used to working with them.”

Socialtext founder Ross Mayfield works out of an unassuming office in downtown Palo Alto, a couple of blocks away from the Caltrain station (if you listen hard, you can hear the trains clanging) and a stone’s throw from the sprawling Stanford University campus.

Like just about everywhere else in Silicon Valley, Socialtext’s low-tech surroundings are a foil for the hi-tech business taking place. People talk on the phone about ‘mikis’ (mobile wikis) and ‘webinars’ (online seminars) as if these were common words in the English language. ‘Wiki Wednesday across the way’ is scrawled in faded marker pen across the reception whiteboard.

After a few minutes, Ross appears. He’s the first company chairman I’ve seen wearing shorts – ever. Admittedly it’s 28 ºC today. We go outside to sit a shady spot under a couple of Cypress trees, partly so I can make the most of the weather, partly so that Ross can have a cigarette.

Ross co-founded Socialtext, ‘the world’s first wiki company’ in 2002. What made him feel that this type of social media could work in business?

“So much interesting stuff was happening in the social space [at that time]. Adrian from Ryze was putting on loft parties and wanted to connect the people who went to them; Ben and Mena Trott from Six Apart, Evan Williams from Blogger…they all created tools to scratch an itch, to interact with friends from a community. The guy who invented Trillian [instant messaging between different networks] did it simply to connect with a girl he had met on a beach.

“It was just after the [dotcom] crash and a lot of people had been made redundant and I guess had time on their hands. The thing is, these [new] tools had better social dynamics, and they were lightweight and easy to use compared to the clunkier enterprise systems.”

Ross and his co-founders were keen to take that simplicity and apply it to business. For two and half years, they worked out of their own homes (“in a distributed fashion” says Ross, not without irony).

So, what’s the main diff between the early noughties and now?

“In 2001, it was the fear economy – the only people selling technology were the security companies, and then 9/11 happened! Now, there’s much less hype; buying behaviour and investing behaviour are verging on the rational.”

Ross cites the change in the consumer markets – the growth of wikipedia, open source etc – as a key change: “on the consumer side, the bar is raised higher”. Consumer products genuinely have to work for people, otherwise they simply won’t be used.

The growth of blogging, in particular, has helped enormously:

“We used to have a lot of push back from PR and legal departments. Not any more. Now there are thousands of blogging policies up on the web for corporate lawyers to pull down and adapt.”

In November 2007, the company entered a new phase, securing a further $9.5million of funding. This seemed a good point for Ross to hand over his CEO role to Eugene Lee, a former executive at Cisco and Adobe:

“I’m very much an early stage guy, very hands on,” says Ross. “I always knew that I’d have to step aside at some point. You start off wearing all the hats, then you’ve got to give every one away, ideally to suitable people. It was a very emotional decision when I first had to step aside [at my previous start-up].”

See Ross’ blog for more of his thoughts on ceding control.

Needless to say, the Socialtext platform, originally a wiki solely for the highly tech-literate, has grown and developed in six years. WYSIWYG editing, introduced around 2004, was a step forward. But the real tipping point came in 2006, when mass collaboration became possible.

It was around this time that more ambitious ideas, such as ‘Wikipedias’ for companies were introduced. The whole user experience became more transparent and participatory, meaning that ‘non-teccie’ types could access and use the platform with relative ease.

Ross constantly thinks about how to make the platform more genuinely useful – in internet parlance, maximising ‘network effects’ (ie, the more people using a network, the more powerful it becomes). Identifying when and how people interact with the Socialtext platform has been a key part of making it more relevant:

“Our VP of Professional Services came up with the framework of ‘in the flow’ use cases as opposed to ‘above the flow’: where [people used our platform] as an integral part of the process of a project, rather than outside of it. These [in the flow use cases] are what we specialise in.”

One context in which Ross has found social media to be particularly useful is change management – where people can “collaborate on the change”. He points to the recent merger between two large companies (7,000 employees each) as a good example:

“The wiki and social networking became a great way of getting cross-pollination to happen…in the past it would be 6 or 7 people, and $1million, just to define a structure or taxonomy. Now the approach is to let the structure emerge, let staff collaborate on building it.”

And Ross has some words of comfort for any CEO fretful of any loss of control s/he might experience:

“The person who benefits most [from good knowledge management systems] is the CEO because he can drill down and see exactly who did something and why it happened.”

There’s no doubt about it, Socialtext must be doing something right. Today, it’s a global company, with offices in California, New York and the UK, employing 50 people and serving more than 4,000 organisations.

The easy-to-use, accessible style of software that originally came from the social space has now entered the corporate world. For good.