While Rome burns, Jon Friedman of MarketWatch is engaging in one of those futile exercises so common when people in the information industry try to sort out their world from their own perspectives: he’s debating whether Google is a media company or not.
The argument goes like this: Google does not create or own content, therefore it is not a media company. That argument assumes that the way to understand an information company is to look at the company itself: What content does it own? What does it buy and sell? Since Google does not, in that view, look like a media company, it is not a media company. That’s the same reasoning that did in the passenger railroads in the United States: the airline industry did not have trains and therefore it was not part of the same industry. This is containerspeak; a company is defined by the type of containers it produces (or doesn’t produce), rather than by the function it serves for customers.
However, if you look at companies not through the lens of the companies themselves, but rather through the lens of the people who use their products, you get a better perspective. People use Google to find information, answer questions, and solve problems, just as they use media companies and publishers to perform those same tasks. In fact, Google is eating the traditional media companies’ lunch when it comes to assisting with some of those tasks.
So while Google continues to compete with media companies, draw users from media companies, and draw ad revenues from media companies, representatives of media companies debate whether Google is a media company. Google walks and quacks like a duck; the failure to respond to it like a duck is another of the information industry’s slow-moving train wrecks in action.
