Birth of a brand operating system
Via Seeking Alpha, the Stalwart reports on Google’s incremental development of a “Google operating system” before our very eyes. I would interject that Google doesn’t realize it yet, but this is really a “brand operating system.” To date, however, there’s not much Google brand to be seen.
Nonetheless, the birth process is in full swing.
From the Stalwart:
In response to an analyst question regarding the blizzard of new Google products being a bit confusing, [Google co-founder] Sergey Brin says we shouldn’t think of these as each individual products, but rather as new features within the overarching single Google product. Thus indeed what we’re seeing is the Google operating system under construction . . ..
A little further on, Brin adds:
What we are concerned about is that if we continue to develop so many new individual products that are all their assorted silos, you will have to essentially search for our products before you can even use them. And then you will have to search before you can do a search, in many cases.
Instead what we’re doing now is we are trying to create the horizontal functionality across a range of products, across media types and so forth.
Google has been working in this vein for a while, especially with functional suites like Google University, a good step toward an enabling brand.
Limitations of a product suite
A product suite can only go so far, however. A suite is focused on functionality, and that is both its strength and its limitation. Computers can happily address each other through strict protocols of functionality, and applied functionality drives many workflow processes. People, however, are not “functions.” And “functionality” is a long way from living.
And for Google, that’s the rub.
It’s time for Google to lead
There’s no algorithm for people. A “Google operating system” can run Google’s 500,000 computers, but it won’t do diddly for Google’s customers unless it’s predicated on what those customers want to be, and where they’re headed. To move its customers beyond the clutches of Microsoft and Yahoo, Google needs to articulate a customer goal, and to show customers the way.
Brand operating system defined
How Google leads and interacts with its customers is part and parcel of its brand operating system. In our New Brand Glossary we define a Brand OS as follows:
Brand Operating System
The Brand Operating System (Brand OS) is a set of steps, leaps and revelations that enables customers to do more, and be more, through the brand. It includes integrated context, content and tools that customers can adopt to pursue richer realms of living. The Brand OS provides traction for customers in the direction they wish to go. In practice, it functions as a customer operating system championed by the brand, and fully interactive with it.
Until now, Google has been mostly about Google, inwardly focused, keeping the door closed while tossing new apps out through the transom until they cover the hall floor. The apps are great, but truth be told, they’re not the real deal.
The real deal is . . . us
We need a living, breathing customer to take shape in the Google womb, and to be delivered kicking and screaming. We don’t want to watch it on YouTube, either. That customer is us. It’s our experience that Google has to deliver.
Enough of machine code. It’s time for leaps. And revelations.