Troubleshooting Life 307, November 2 - Set up business intelligence systems on all “planets”

C-SPAN Transcript from YouTube (light edits)

BRIAN LAMB, journalist, founder of C-SPAN:

You say you made 13 trips to Silicon Valley, Google's headquarters, stayed for 13 weeks. Why?

KEN AULETTA, journalist, author, political columnist, media critic:

I was visiting another planet. This is Silicon Valley, I'm from New York, I spent a lot of my time, I mean, I wrote a book on Microsoft, so I spent time out there. But I spent a lot of my time looking at traditional media, and Hollywood.

When you spend time out there, you realize it's a world with a different set of values than then you see in most traditional media institutions. Engineers start from an assumption, and the two founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the assumption that “most of the way things operate are inefficient,” and they are, they are right, they are inefficient.

But you start from that assumption, you empower an engineer with that assumption, an engineer asked a simple question: “Why? “Why can't we have free phone service? Why can't we digitize all the books in print, 20 million of them? Why can we put television for free on YouTube? Why can't we sell advertising much more cheaply, and tell them, the customer, or the advertiser, you know, “who's actually watching your ads?”  And we only charge them when someone clicks on their ad, as opposed to whether it catches their eye or not, which is the way it's done traditional world.

Once you start asking those questions you begin to invade other people's business, and it's not good for those businesses. What I discovered is that in this world of Google, the engineer is king, and the engineers King not only in the sense that they get 20% of their time off from Google every engineer at Google gets 20% of their time one day a week to work on anything they want. A lot of the innovations that come out of Google come from that 20% time that freedom that sense of liberation they conveyed to their their engineers, but also what happens is that you realize as you spent time, I, this visitor to this other planet, I sit in the Google meetings, I understand maybe half the words they could have been speaking Swahili I have to have it interpreted.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt, the CEO, they're all engineers, they understand every word. What you realize, what I came to understand sitting there by osmosis, over a period of time, is that in fact the engineer is the content creator at Google they're the equivalent of a screen writer or the director they're creating content different kinds of contact YouTube content. Software that enables you to you know read or watch on your, or do Google Maps, I mean that's content.

When it comes to journalism on Hollywood, or business, Silicon Valley, any “planet” on this Earth, Ken Auletta is so good. Consider supporting trusted journalists directly too, Reader.

Of course, if you have a zero trust policy, then investigate the truth yourself using any and all of your available devices.

ACTION POINT: Set up business intelligence systems on all “planets”