Ben Wills vs. Garrett French, Round One: "is Google cool or not?"
I enjoy productive argument. My closest friends/colleagues are those with whom I have arguments that give me some new insight.

Well, either new insight for me or the sense that I just ripped the top off of their head and pressed the HOLY CRAP button and they're gibbering and twitching on the carpet from the impact of the insight *I* delivered (known internally at MSI as a Chuck Norris roundhouse kick to the brain).

Often though, seemingly unproductive, emotion-driven pseudo-arguments result in new understandings for me too, as evidenced by: The Meta-Web and the Race for Hyper-Relevance Online, which spawned in part from my muddled, halting, emotion-driven pseudo-attempts to explain "Web 2.0".

Either way I win - winning in this sense defined as my gain in wisdom and understanding or the personal satisfaction of having participated in that gain for someone else.

Ben Wills vs. Garrett French
Ben Wills, one of my *interviewers* at MarketSmart Interactive two years ago, who's since left MSI to work with my former boss Andy Beal, remains one of those friends with whom I spar on issues of business, marketing, and life in general.

I'm excited to announce that this sparring is now moving online, where it should be, where everyone can join in on the fun ;)

on cooling off MSFT
Our latest sparring match began on Friday, when I read his post: Five Years and Lots of Cash. In the 50 words of his post he said, in essence, "it will take MORE THAN time and money to win in the search space."

While I agree, I also think that this is a non-statement, in as much as you can say that about ANY human endeavor. EVERYTHING takes more than time (the only valid measure of personal investment) and money (a neutral medium for the transfer of value).

In his post's comments, I asked him to expand:

Ben I'd love to hear your thoughts on what it would take for MSN to overtake Google and Yahoo.

In other words if YOU were leading MSN how would YOU do it?

In 100 words or less ;)
9:54 AM

After that post Ben and I gtalked a little and escalated the ego stakes with some key disagreements on the term "cool," and a fundamental disagreement about whether or not Google itself is cool. If memory serves I may have said something about "crushing" him.

All crushings aside, I hold that Google is not at all cool, while Ben holds that, if I remember correctly, Google IS cool. And that to survive, MSN must invest in a shift to a culture of innovation, and this innovation will make MSN cool.

on defining a theory of cool
Other debates formed in the comment thread on Ben's initial post, but I woke up thinking about a theory of cool this morning and so that's what I'm going to write about today. And I hope, Ben, that I haven't twisted your position around too much.

I suspect too that once Ben and I go through the term-definition ritual we will find that we're more in agreement than we thought. So in one fell mega-post I'm going to outline my definition of cool and how that could apply to MSN's revitalization.

(My astute readers, who clearly have too much time on their hands, will notice that I initially declared "cool" not worth defining in my comments to Ben. I have decided an exercise in meta-ethics worthwhile, especially in that it enables me to put off laundry ;)

I'm developing my ideas based on Wikipedia's theory of cool and my wee bit of reading into Malcolm Gladwell's tipping point last night. I got through the Hush Puppies part and would like to add some extractions from that section into my core exploration of cool. And plus the fact that I am blisteringly cool myself.

So here are my musings on a definition of cool, and why Google is NOT cool. In the least little bit. And then what I think MSN would have to do to get cool.

first assertions
First off I assert that cool can only exist in a system of limited resources. Yes I know. Everything, no wait -*EVERYTHING*- exists in a system of limited resources.

Within our human system there are external resources that are needful to immediate survival (food, shelter, oxygen, money, etc...) and then there are resources that are needful to a healthy, highly functioning sense of self (peer recognition/approval, internal recognition/approval, etc...) to name two.

It is within the system of this secondary definition of limited resources - the play between external and internal approval - that "cool" gained currency as a term to describe the value of a person, place or thing in terms of how it adds to or subtracts from a person's internal approval and sense of self worth.

So to illustrate Gladwell's Hush Puppy example in my terms, a group of hipsters assigned "internal-approval currency" to a brand of shoes.

They decided tacitly amongst their group that when one wore Hush Puppy loafers, one could bestow upon oneself an increase in overall self worth. They manufactured "cool."

"cool" as irony-engineering through the language of brand symbols
I see these particular hipsters as hyper-creative engineers of sorts with a high passion for disdain, and assert that the decision to adopt Hush Puppies was far from arbitrary. At the time of their decision, 1994, Hush Puppies, according to Gladwell, were languishing in strip mall shoe stores, though had enjoyed mainstream popularity in the 80's.

Because of this hipster group's attunement to their hunger for self worth, and their group bond - formed in part by their alignment against mainstream assertions of which styles do or don't deliver an increase of internal approval - they adopted Hush Puppies as a temporary signal amongst them that they themselves own (assign value to) style.

They selected this signal - the Hush Puppy shoe - precisely because it had fallen from favor with the mainstream, because the mainstream had decided it was not cool anymore.

Most importantly, they selected the Hush Puppy because the mainstream would JUDGE the Hush Puppy as not-cool and disdain it with the same heightened sense of self worth that the hipsters felt against the mainstream.

So by setting the mainstream (and note that we're talking about mainstream New York here...) up to judge *them* for their fashion sense, these hipsters engineered for themselves the opportunity to JUDGE and exclude the mainstream.

This relatively complex irony-engineering through the language of brand symbols is a large part of what defined "cool" in the particular time and place that Gladwell described (SoHo/East Village 1994-1995).

(The hipster mullet is another example of cool derived through irony-engineering in hair styles that dates from around 2001 I think. Arranged by best [hipster mullet] image results: Yahoo. Google. Ask. MSN. Implicit in the wearing of a hipster mullet is the not-giving a f--- but actually really giving a mega-enormous f--- dynamic.)

cool MUST BE LEVERAGED off of a group of people who "don't get it"
Soon fashion designers adopted the shoe as a sign that they too got the "joke." They saw, as the hipsters did, that they could easily leverage a stronger sense of self worth for the wearers of their fashion by essentially thumbing their noses at the mainstream by eliciting from them a thumbed nose at their seemingly-poor fashion sense.

Also it was important to show these hipster punk SoHo kids that they could be subversive of *their* styles in a haute couture way. (An equivalent in the online world would be Robert Scoble snaking an idea off your blog but not crediting you with a link. And there was no real way to respond.)

So, based on my parsing of one expression of cool in one particular time and place I conclude for the moment that the term "cool" actually describes a signal (be that action, article of clothing, type of music, or some other meme) that leverages self worth to its bearer off of a group of people who "don't get it."

Whatever that "IT" might be.

(MSN's feebly grasping in this direction with their oh-my-dinosaur!-it's-time-to-buy-more-MSN-shit campaign, though to truly make the conceit work they should be calling THEMSELVES dinosaurs rather than their customers...)

Google's cool pretty much sputtered out with Orkut
So, to tie this into my "Google isn't cool" argument, I hold that there is no longer any self-worth to be leveraged from using Google or any of its products. Google has not been cool - based on my definition of cool - since GMail. And further, I assert that Google's cool pretty sputtered out with Orkut.

To better qualify, there is no self-worth for ME to leverage out of using Google or any of its products. And therefore I say that Google isn't cool.

Ben, I suspect, you will argue that the mainstream has begun leveraging Google for that boost in self-worth and self-approval that comes when one discovers how close information is that once seemed so distant. From people who declare, "Google's results are the best" even though they don't search on any other engines.

To this demographic Google certainly conveys that sense of "being cool."

how cool can a utility be?
I hold that Google is now a utility though. And I ask you, Ben, how "cool" are the lights when you flick them on? How "cool" is the fact that water flows out of your faucet when you turn the knob?

Google is not cool now, nor will they be again unless they can deliver that sense of self-worth that comes from distributing a resource that's in limited supply and high demand - such as they did at first with gmail accounts.

Not that this really matters from a business sense - Google's search function still works VERY well.

But I think that, despite Google's recent clumsy nods at Web 2.0, we'll increasingly see the company's offerings relegated to an API role within the web's ecosystem (gMaps API is where the "coolest" stuff is happening for Google right now... because I say so) as folks (and very soon the mainstream...) increasingly build their own meta-web access points and need effective ways to organize and navigate through them.

I further hold that the only way that MSN (and Google I suppose) can regain coolness is by building the tools it will take for people to generate for themselves that most-limited of resources - internal approval, that sense of self worth that comes when we bestow upon ourselves that warm glow of respect at the expense of someone else's obliviousness.

Whether that's by denying some jerkoff's friend request or enabling praise from others regarding their hyper-relevant data organizations.

(Let the record show that I like Kathy Sierra's methods for enabling users to generate self worth the most. It's not cool. It's way way more constructive than "cool" could ever dream of being.)

MSN needs the developer equivalent of a hipster mullet?
And MSN has to do this for online's equivalent of Gladwell's "hush puppy hipsters." Whoever they may be.

If I held the wheel at marketing for MSN, and total Ballmer/Gates buy in based on my HOLY CRAP button pushing in their brains, I'd go totally retro with MSN. I'd reach WAY back into the vault and start pulling out that early messaging and look to say, "we get that we are now an aging diplodocus attempting to reinvent itself as a Morganucodon watsoni (first known mammal)." I'd play on those early geek-ass pictures of Bill Gates.

I'd own MSN's oblivious, butt-of-jokeness and remind the current arbiters of cool that the innovative brilliance with which Gates drove MSFT initially is there through the release of... shit I don't know - I'm not a developer.

I don't know what speaks clearly to them in terms of their interior sense of self worth. For that I'd have to do a lot of reading and studying. I'd start with Kathy Sierra's Creating Passionate Users (I already bought her Design Patterns book even though I'm not a Java developer... it's fantastically written and engaging).

This could start as simply as a highly-useful and widely, though grudgingly used API. Also, I strongly believe that their future does INDEED lie in the media direction. (Forgive my non-statements ;)

Also I'd hire Ben Wills to bring in "Fernando Flores to reform internal communication, Ricardo Semler to reform culture, and give them the reins. Ballmer/Gates could even keep strategic responsibilities."

Though not until Ben and I first hammered out our definitions of "culture," "communication," and "strategic." ;)

wrapping it up
So folks, that's my way too long, blog-busting write up of a definition of cool and, loosely, how I see that definition tying in with the future of Google and MSN.

I wrote it, of course, for Ben, but look forward to any commentary from those who take the time to parse through my thinking and point out instances of myopia, conceptual opacity and unconvincingness.

Or who want to let me know which of my assertions pressed that elusive HOLY CRAP button.

Either way I'll be gratified :)
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |