Dinesh

If it’s true that the ultimate purpose of Google Office is not to serve Google Office users, but to be a playing chip in the game against MS, then I have to take back everything I said above. If Google really doesn’t care about Office, then the billboards don’t matter one way or the other. The billboards are just a game, because Google Office is just a game.

However, if Google does believe in Google Office, and does ultimately care about it over the long term as a product in and of itself, then I stick by my existing interpretation: Billboard ads are a 180-degree turnaround in Google’s explicitly stated bottom-up, user-driven approach to everything “web”. It’s a signal to the rest of us that if we really want a quality product, service, web-site, etc. to succeed, we ourselves cannot rely on user-driven, relevance-based marketing. And computational research into that sort of marketing might no longer be (perceived) as important as it once was. For the reasons mentioned above.

Dinesh

I am also quite curious if the campaign will make headway. And my feelings about advertising also notwithstanding, I honestly wish ‘em well in the attempt. But whether or not it succeeds, it’s still true that Google feels it needs big billboard ads targeting CEO-types in order to overcome that (justified or not) impression that it isn’t as good as Microsoft in this domain.

That’s a big deal.

Did Google need big billboard ads targeting CEO-types in order to convince people that its search engine was better than any and all the market leaders at the time? No. Google just made a great product, a fantastic search engine, and let the marketing do itself. Ask any CEO out there, and I’m sure they’ll tell you that (justified or not) Google is the search engine to use. Google Search is big boy search. No billboard told them this. No billboard had to.

So what does this say, what does this “signal” to the rest of us, if Google feels that building a “great product that people love” doesn’t work anymore, that they need to resort to old school Madison Avenue tactics to spread the information? And, more importantly, what does that tell me, as a researcher, and the type of problems that are interesting to study? I think it says a lot, and it’s worth thinking about.

That said, I suspect Jonathan is right that they are targeting IT decision makers rather than individual users. I certainly don’t decide whether my employers using Microsoft or Google office tools.

Still, I think Google has to overcome a widespread impression (justified or not) that, in this domain, it isn’t as good as Microsoft. My feelings about advertising notwithstanding, I’m curious if Google’s campaign will make headway on this front.

Thread #1: Over the past few years, I’ve gone to a couple of the “Office 2.0″ conferences (http://office20.com), and heard Google make the case (there and at other venues) that their office suite would succeed because it was a very grassroots, bottom up approach. Workers didn’t need to have the approval of IT Managers, CEOs, CFOs, or CIOs in order to start using web based office apps. Everything ran in a web browser, and therefore with a quality offering, adoption would bubble up from techies-in-the-know into the company as a whole. The same way Google web search bubbled up. There was no need, Google claimed for many years, to make a push from the top down.

Thread #2: Google founded its company on an anti-banner platform. They created their ad platform, their whole revenue stream, with that explicit idea that if an ad is non-relevant it is not useful. Out of that arose a whole new line of academic and industrial research.

So now, with this counteroffensive against Microsoft, they may indeed be doing you say, going after the technologically-unsavvy CEOs. But this sends two messages to me, from these two threads: First, it says that Google is no longer confident that their office suite will succeed in the same way that their web search succeeded, bottom up. Second, it says that they no longer believe that relevance-driven ads are capable enough to propagate information to those who need to know it, of getting the right signals out.

I get that it’s a counteroffensive. What makes it interesting is the type and manner of that counteroffensive. The revolution was supposed to have occurred bottom up. The “signalling” was supposed to have followed this brave new Web 2.0-driven model. It didn’t. Bottom up, user-driven didn’t work, so they went with a traditional, non-relevance, top down, status quo, old school signal. Here we have a practical, real-world case study in what it takes to get your information out to, and adopted by, the people that matter. And it didn’t happen the way that it was supposed to, in a way that a lot of research is trying to study (bottom up, social propagation).

That is fascinating to me. That shifts my perception about what I think are interesting research paths. It sends strong signal to me, obviously unintentionally on Google’s part, about the value of certain avenues of research. That’s why I find this information so interesting.

Am I still missing the point? Not the explicit point, the explicit message or signal that Google was trying to send. But the unintentional consequences of that point. That’s what I see here.

This is what economists call “signalling.” Buying advertising on that scale basically advertises that you are a big boy playing in the big leagues which is important to corner-office types even if it looks creepy to us in the trenches.

Moreover, perception about what sort of research is interesting research, what sort of problems are interesting and worthwhile problems, is also all tied up in the ever-shifting ebb-and-flow between search, advertising, attention, relevance, and branding. Changes in one area alter the marketplace, not only of commerce but also of ideas, in the other areas. Witness the rise of computational advertising. That’s only become a research topic because the rise in popularity of a particular kind of relevance (known-item, lookup) combined with branding and shifts in attention have made it interesting.

I don’t want to do my research in a vacuum. I want to do it with an eye toward that ever-shifting landscape. And this new branding push is a significant shift, imho, and will have ramifications for what sort of research gets done. So I think it’s important.