In his response to my review of his book What Would Google Do? Jeff Jarvis describes me as “a convenient totem for the media’s insistence on viewing the world through old media lenses.”
I definitely feel like a totem after reading the post on his blog because he attributes to me a set of views I don’t hold (or only partially hold) and then criticises those instead of mine.
Here are a couple of examples from his post:
The Financial Times’ John Gapper gave my book a bad review because he refused to go along with its organizing premise and principal: that our economy and society are undergoing fundamental shifts as we move past the industrial age and that Google is a worthy totem to use to understand that change.
No, I don’t refuse to go along with the first part – I think it is true. I even think Google might be “a worthy totem” (making me an unworthy totem, presumably). I just think Jeff reached some broad and mistaken conclusions about how businesses should respond.
That, I realised, is why Gapper admires [Apple], because it still has control, like the old media moguls. He defines and measures value in their old media terms.
No, I admire Apple for making good products and being able to charge a premium for them. I pointed out in my review that the curbing of distribution monopolies is good for consumers but I don’t think that it helps businesses make money. That is not a value judgment.
Oddly for the author of a book about the company, he fails to acknowledge that Google itself makes profits through dominance of distribution.
Google is not a distributor. Indeed, its greatest misstep to date, the book settlement, came in part because it uncharacteristically was going to control and distribute content (that it didn’t own). Google doesn’t distribute. It organizes. It links. Google is not in the software business. It is in the platform business (advertising being its primary platform).
Here, he mixes up Google’s editorial model with its business model. Google may not control content but it certainly controls and distributes advertising. It makes all – or virtually all – of its money by taking fees to distribute search advertisements.
In general, I think he would rather caricature me an old media Tsarist with dark, conservative motives than to address what I actually wrote, which can be found here.
