Author Ken Auletta Talks About Google and Its “Lack of Emotional Intelligence”
by Kara Swisher
Posted on November 12, 2009 at 12:50 AM PT
Guess what? Google has too many Spocks and not enough Captain Kirks.
This is one of the many interesting insights BoomTown gleaned from a video interview last night–which you can see below–with well-known New Yorker scribe Ken Auletta, who has just written a new book, “Googled: The End of the World as We Know It.”
This “lack of emotional intelligence” at the search giant, said Auletta, reminded him a lot of the subject of one of his previous books: Microsoft (MSFT).
Oh, the delicious irony!
Auletta was feted at a lovely party last night at the San Francisco house of Common Sense Media’s Jim Steyer, where a range of Google (GOOG) execs, Internet folks and fans gathered to talk about the book.
It’s all about Google, its history and, most important, its impact on the world. And how you look at the powerful search giant depends entirely on whether you are the changer or the changed, as Auletta stresses in multiple anecdotes in the book.
Traditional media, for example, have certainly been mucho irked of late about the impact of digital technologies on their businesses and have not been shy about casting blame most heapingly on Google’s Silicon Valley plate.
And government regulators are also giving the company the hairy eyeball, much as they had previously done to Microsoft.
Auletta and I talked about all of this and more in the video interview below, in which he notes that he told Googlers at a talk at their adorkable Googleplex HQ in Mountain View, Calif., yesterday that they need to focus less on being engineering brainiacs and more on trying to understand how to deal with fears of their growing power.
Here’s my interview with Auletta about this, as well as what old media needs to do to deal with all the change Google has wrought. (And you can see interviews I did with guests at the party, too).
And below that is one of the disturbing number of mash-up music videos about “Star Trek” buddies, the highly illogical Kirk and the Vulcanish Spock, the geek bromance of all time.
Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.
Comments
Two things….
Rumors of Microsoft’s death are much exaggerated. If it were a small company, of the sort that the New York Times is getting to be, then yes, we could see the handwriting on the wall. But it’s a big company, with lots of money in the bank, and more importantly an installed base that can’t be easily dislodged.
Suppose Congress/Obama mandated that every vehicle purchased by the US government be from GM. Furthermore, everyone who wanted to vista DC to interact with government had to use a GM vehicle (hey this actually happened!), and everyone corresponding by other means must prove ownership of a GM vehicle. Another company comes along with personal airplanes that fly themselves and, theoretically, obsolete the car, and the government requires that they all be equipped with 4 heavy rubber tires and be shaped like a car. After trying to ignore complaints of unfair GM advantages, the government launches an investigation into companies still making horse drawn carriages (IBM in my little morality play).
That’s the situation that has been in place with Microsoft for years, and even with some Google fans in the White House, I don’t see it changing anytime soon. While our politicians may talk about change, the unelected people who are in Washington don’t care for it at all. The only reason the Feds stopped buying Wang mini computers was that the company stopped selling them. There was gnashing of teeth when bureaucrats had to actually think about what all those machines were doing so that functionality could be transferred to machines running Windows, Oracle, Powerbuilder. Most of those people plan to retire before they ever put themselves through such a thing again.
As to logic versus “emotional intelligence”… I’ve always thought such terms are really intended to describe things that are in fact logic, but which haven’t been described yet in terms of logic. “Intuition” for example. That is, if in fact the actions you take by such means ultimately work out for the good. But what if the results of this intuition can’t be measured, and what if those who propose it as unmeasurable do so intentionally?
Of course there is a lot of that going around these days, with changes being proposed the benefits of which cannot be measured, now or in the future. How convenient. Such thinking is the playground for corruption and snake oil salesmen, voodoo economics and ultimately Luddism. The extent to which Google partakes of this is proportional to the extent to which they cause their own downfall.
For how many years have we been asked to accept the notion that we are well served by a desktop operating system which is installed insecure by design, but for which you must pay extra to buy software to change all those settings to (hopefully) make it more secure? That there are “viruses” that the OS can’t detect, but which add-on software can? That sounds a lot like the sort of “emotional intelligence” we are being asked to consume these days in all aspects of our life.”
I hope Google sticks to it’s engineering bias toward being able to predict and measure things. I just wish the country as a whole could reacquaint itself with that same concept and atttude.
Posted by Mac Beach at November 12th, 2009 at 11:38 amM:
Whoa! What do you really think? Also, you are an alien too, right?
Posted by Kara Swisher at November 12th, 2009 at 12:51 pmIt’s that new Via coffee from Starbucks I’m sure.
Posted by Mac Beach at November 12th, 2009 at 6:57 pm