That’s the question Laurie Sullivan of MediaPost asked me after watching this Bloomberg Game Changers video on Sergey Brin and Larry Page in which the suggestion is made that Steve Jobs was targeted to be Google’s first CEO.
My response, along with input from some fellow search “insiders,” were included in Laurie’s SearchBlog piece of the same title last week.
I told Laurie that “Google would be a lot different. Cleaner, less-cluttered search results. More focused on products not software. More focused on brand advertising. Much less open and transparent. The list could go on and on.”
That said, it’s worth noting that Google and Jobs do have quite a few similarities so, while the company may not have turned out there same, it’s likely the combination would have worked.
Both Google and Jobs:
- Hold user experience above all
- Know how to stay relevant (see Chapter 1)
- See mobile as the holy grail
- Have an over-inflated view of self-import (which is actually quite important when setting out to revolutionize industry/ies)
