Today, I start a series of posts (as I find the time), to explore what I like to call corporate badassitude. Wherein, I examine a company/enterprise, and on the basis of a few criteria (or more, or less, or none at all depending on my mood), I will postulate on the badassitude of that corporation or company or enterprise or its leadership or anything else in the corporation that I decide to talk about for the purpose of reaching a badassitude conclusion.
For our inaugural look for the purposes of declaring that a company is badass, I decided to take the very easy path. Today we will talk a little bit about Google. Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, then PhD students at Stanford. They posited that an algorithm that ranked pages based on the number and types of linking relationships with other pages would offered up better search results. They went against the grain at the time and decided to just do one thing – search. No content UI tricks, no gimmicks, etc. Just search. And they have been kicking ass since. As an aside, the Google search engine was first named “BackRub” – which does not have a badass ring to it. Then it was googol – which I think had a rather badass ring to it – before it was Google (which as a name is probably just neutrally badass).
Once they had the search thing nailed down, Google started to branch out, one direction at a time. At other times it looked like they were branching into many new directions at the same time. Sometimes, it seemed they did it just because it seemed interesting to them. And every time they did it, they seemed to kick ass. They have always been so badass and so confident in their badassitude that their prospectus specifically says to investors something to this effect “We are glad you invested in us but we couldn’t give a rats ass if you didn’t…” and they add “We will do whatever the fuck we want in whatever industry we want and if you don’t like it, you can go jump in the lake….” I am paraphrasing and exaggerating but that is just about what the prospectus said. Badassitude? I think so!
Ten years later, they have done what I thought would take forever for any company to do. They really, truly started to put some fear into Microsoft. For all intents and purposes, Google now has the Mobile OS of the future – even as all reasonable people agree that Mobile Windows must surely be declared dead. Google owns so much shit – from data to super powerful hardware, to data pipes, companies etc. And the rest of us do not know what they intend to do with. It will be interesting, should they ever get seriously challenged, to see the giant wake up and unleash the power they are sitting on.
Google has the inside track for leadership in cloud computing. And they keep doing things to Google Apps that with every small step, make desktop software a little bit more irrelevant. And it looks like they do something literally every day. Totally badass. The perpetual Beta is such a neat concept that even when a launch does not look as clean as it should (Buzz?), the almost casual introduction protects them from the hard hit that would come from screwing up a big launch. And because it always looks like Beta, they can make fixes without the brouhaha other would suffer for a simple fix.
I could go on and on about Google’s badassitude. But Google is badass more than anything else, for reinventing search, remaking search, leading search and indeed owning search. Pure. Badassitude! Period.
