Jeff Jarvis has a crush on Google

I wish Bruce Greenwald, my Corporate Strategy professor, would call Jeff Jarvis and tell him to stick to his competitive advantages. The man is pretty solid as a commentator on media, on why some newspapers are screwed and how serious web news outlets ought to develop their businesses to become serious competitors.

He is not, however, an all-around economic pundit and should not try to become one. Yet that seems to be exactly what he’s trying to do on his blog and in his new book “What Would Google Do?” trying to use the company as a model for everything. In this post, he tries to give us the Google model for the financial sector, but he winds up spending many words undercutting (hedging?) himself as he takes melodramatic (highly leveraged) positions. Some gems:

“Google’s first advantage is being digital. Who wants to be in the business of stuff any more – building cars, printing newspapers, selling CDs, growing food… Now the best retreat is to the value of knowledge.” You cannot engineer food…the characters in Brave New World tried that, and it didn’t work out so well.

“In Google’s economy, small is the new big. Of course, big is still big — Google itself is gargantuan.” Point being?

“Indeed, Google does not want to own the assets — content to commerce — upon which its empire is built.” This is different from banks that re-packaged and sold off their bad loans like hot potatoes how?

“Another hallmark of Google’s economy is transparency. Even as Google remains opaque about details of how it does business — its ad commission, for example — it demands transparency of the rest of us. For without openness, we get no search-engine optimization, no precious Googlejuice.” Hypocrisy much?

So much for the argument that being in the blogosphere forces reporters to keep it real.