CNet News reports that Google is the best brand -- once again -- for the third year in a row, according to a market research firm Millward Brown. Google's brand, according to the data (which is calculated based on interviews and financial information), topped the charts at $86.1 billion as the world’s most powerful global brand. (Compare this to the second place holder which was GE with a value of $71.4 billion and Microsoft which hit third place with $70.9 billion.)
As the Google brand continues to imprint itself in our lives, there is no question that it is also imposing itself on ad agencies and marketers as it seeks to quietly unseat the media sellers as well.
This remarkable organization and its grand scheme to be everything to everyone, for information and communication, has even cloaked itself in a social network under its Google Documents application.
Google Docs, an online shared environment for excel documents, photos, and collaborative exchange, with a determined set of participants, sets the stage for and expanded social network.
Consider the following:
- Controlled multi-user environment: Simultaneous usage by multiple persons. Access is controlled by the person who created the spreadsheet--users can be set as collaborators or just viewers.
- Presence indicators: All users sharing the spreadsheet are informed of the presence of others in the form of a chat window, temporary notifications, and a mobile avatar (see next point).
- Real-time text chat: Plus voice if you use Skype.
- Unique, mobile avatars: Each user is represented by a uniquely-colored outline on an individual spreadsheet cell. A simple avatar, but distinct, and user-controlled. It can move around the spreadsheet.
- Spatial relationships between users: My avatar can be beside, above, or below yours.
- User-generated content: All Google gives you is a blank spreadsheet. The users add the content. I don't think it's possible to add proper graphics to a spreadsheet, but it is possible to color a cell and to add colored text to a cell. It is also possible to lock rows and columns, which could provide a visual effect.
- Dynamic content: It's a spreadsheet, so it's possible to put formulas into cells which rely upon and affect other cells.
- Persistent world: A Google spreadsheet endures over time--it is a "live," changeable, but persistent environment which remembers its state after the users have logged out.
- Communication with outside world: Users can opt to be notified by email when the spreadsheet has been changed, on a global, sheet, or cellular level. I believe a Google Doc can also be embedded in a web page.
Oh, here's the definition of a Googol (note the true spelling)... 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 ...one followed by one hundred zeros.
000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 ...one followed by one hundred zeros.
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1 comment:
Hey Paul,
I happened to be reading an old document recently by J.C.R. "Lick" Licklider, the guy whose "Galactic Network" concept of the early 60s eventually became the internet. This particular document I was reading, "Man-Computer Symbiosis", written in 1960, talks about Licklider's vision of the relationship between man and machine in the future. "The hope," he says, "is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today."
Google's incomparable ability to deliver on its mission statement, "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," is making Licklider's vision a reality in our times.
Maybe that's why it's the world's most powerful global brand.
Best,
Rich
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