Musings on the iPhone, Google and Brand Identity Part 2

In Part 1 I pro­posed the the­ory that Apple is in the busi­ness of sell­ing a branded lifestyle, rather than any spe­cific prod­ucts. And that it is that very fact that causes the extreme reac­tions from the nerdis­tani com­mu­nity when­ever Apple does some­thing that the aver­age nerd con­sid­ers to be “wrong.” In the course of dis­cussing this, I noted that Google also sells a brand, and implied that they actu­ally do a bet­ter job of doing so; at least when con­sid­er­ing the nerd mar­ket. In this part I am going to expound on that point.

To under­stand how Google manip­u­lates the nerd mar­ket, first we have to exam­ine what exactly it is that Google sells. In the case of Apple, this ques­tion has an “obvi­ous” answer. If you asked any ran­dom mon­key on the street, “what does Apple sell?” they would answer with some vari­a­tion of “com­put­ers,” “iPods” or the like. If you were to ask the same ques­tion, but sub­sti­tut­ing “Google” for “Apple” I don’t think that you would get nearly the same response.

So, let’s exam­ine the ques­tion. What exactly is it that Google sells?
Do they sell:

• Search Results?
• Mail Hosting?
• Blog Hosting?
• Online Applications?

Of course, the answer to all of the above are “no” even though these are prod­ucts that Google offers (and I’m well aware that Google does actu­ally sell these ser­vices in some instances, but I would argue that those instances make up for an infi­tes­i­mally small amount of Google’s revenue).

What Google sells is adver­tis­ing, a fact made blind­ingly obvi­ous by its aqui­si­tion of DoubleClick. THink about it; almost every page that you see while using a Google ser­vice has an adver­tise­ment embe­ded in it some­where. And, in a stroke of pure bril­liance, Google doesn’t even have to put the effort into detem­rin­ing which ad you see. It’s all dri­ven by you; from the key­words you search on to the con­tents of your email.

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p> To be clear, for the pur­poses of this essay, I’m not atach­ing a value jus­ge­ment to that fact. If you want to read some crit­i­cisms of Google I sug­gest going to <a href=“http://www.google-watch.org/” title=Google Watch” target=“_blank”>Google Watch. I’m not going to get into that here. Ask your­self though, in the mind of the typ­i­cal nerd, doesn’t the fact that Google derives the bulk of its rev­enue from adver­tis­ing make it a hor­ri­ble com­pany. I mean this is the indus­try that brought us the pop-up adver­tise­ment for Cthullu’s sake!

Here’s the way I see it. The rea­son why Google gets a free pass from a large part of the pop­u­la­tion of Neristan is the very same rea­son that Apple is con­stantly get­ting its balls busted by the same peo­ple. Google is also sell­ing a brand, and the brand that they are sell­ing is also “cool;” but it’s nerd cool. Google has gone out of its way to embrace the nerd com­mu­nity. From things like a cor­po­rate mantra of “don’t be evil,” to things like encour­ag­ing their devel­op­ers to work on Open Source projects; Google has spo­ken to the val­ues that nerds embrace. At the same time they bril­liantly pro­duce ser­vices that have an Apple-like sense of sim­pl­city and design. I may not be a fan of Google, but I do respect them.

So, when faced with critisicms such as those at Google Watch, your aver­age nerd is more likely to say “well Google is one of us, so we trust them,” then to whip out the pitch­forks and class-action law­suits. Really, it all boils down to how we iden­tify with each com­pany. Apple dis­a­points nerds, so they have a love-hate rela­tion­ship; and Google reas­sures nerds, so they get a pass.