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.

Today, Steve Jobs introduced the iPad – the long rumoured, anticipated and expected tablet. He called it “a truly magical and revolutionary product today”. Maybe not so much. We already have iphones, netbooks and laptops so there are no surprises with any one of the things the iPad can do. But to be sure, the magic is in the package of all the things it can do easily, intuitively and at a truly magical price for an apple product.

True, at first glance, it looks like just a giant iPod. But there are many who know way more about Steve Jobs and Apple who will tell you that this is the gadget he has always wanted to build and that he only built the iPhone because that was what the available tech allowed at the time. No argument from me there. The concept that is today the The iPad , was first presented in an Apple concept video as the Knowledge Navigator in 1987. 1987!! That was before the internet folks. These guys understood that there would soon be some ubiquitous network intermediating information exchange. You watch that video, replace the voice commands with commands typed into a keyboard, or maybe not if you have the Google voice search app or similar, and you have the iPad.

There is no shortage of accolades and opinions on the release. The folks over at the Guardian featured a coterie of expert reactions (praise really) ranging from design through tech and functionality.  I have not seen the iPad but I watched Steve Jobs’s presentation. From all indications, Apple hit this one out of the park. Maura Judkis takes a look at some of the outstanding green features of the iPad – it’s BPR-free, PVC-free, has arsenic-free display glass, a mercury-free LCD display, 10 hour battery life and more. Dan Frakes gushes about the iPads best five surprises: It is unlocked (woo hoo!), it has external keyboard support it has Epub support and, listen to this pc users, it has a productivity suite with support for Microsoft office!! (I think this is one big deal that not too many people are talking about).

Probably the most disruptive feature of the iPad is the business model. An apple product with, according to Steve Jobs, magical and revolutionary features is coming out of the gate at, by apple product standards, a measly $499. For a comparison point, an unsubsidized iPhone or Nexus One is more expensive. Not only that, the exclusivity that attends the iPhone is absent.  The Wall Street Journal likes their business model too (caveat, there are many things we know WSJ liked in the past that imploded, but still…).

Here are a few things I can say with absolute certainty about the iPad: a) If you make your living on netbooks, find another line of business. Netbooks as we know them today are dead. Period. b) If you are a product manager for Kindle or a similar product, you have your work cut out for you. Except that for a little bit, the Amazon leverage will prop up the product. I will be curious to see how it survives on functionality. c) If you are an iPhone owner, particularly in the US, you like this. First, there is the cross pollination of functionality that you benefit from. Second, there is a partnership with AT&T which will bring in a whole new set of productivity users who will demand more from AT&T. At some point here very soon, it will finally become clear to AT&T that they will have to outspend the competition beefing up their wireless networks or they will not be in business very long. Customers can only take shit for so long – the more customers there are, the shorter that bullshit window.

Steve Jobs is geek. He is a badass. The boys and girls at Apple are geeks. They are badass. The guys over  at Apple in product management are the badasses I want to be when I grow. But when you think about it, there is no badass who has shown greater badassitude than Steve Jobs. This guys imagined this device, even before the technological components were even possible. He stuck with it, did what he could with the available technology of the times and, today, we have an even better Knowledge Navigator aka the iPad. Steve Jobs = Badassitude!