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Goo Jit Su: Google’s Art of Soft Force in Competitive Fights

Note to PR mavens. This is an essay based on my personal opinions. Please, don’t call me to set me straight. The author wears bunny rabbit ears. Thank you for your attention.

I have a friend who is a Georgia Tech computer wizard. I don’t think he went to class; he just took tests and aced them. But like me, he’s logged a number of years on his disc drives. But I recall fondly his many references to various martial arts. He was fascinated by akido, the art of soft force. He even introduced me to his sensei before the two of these unathletic looking lads went off to the Times Square subway station in the hopes of having a street gang try to mug them. Quite a duo: A math wizard and an umpteenth degree black belt from somewhere west of Marina del Rey.

The idea of “soft” fighting is that you use your opponent’s force to defeat the opponent. I remember one day when my son was in high school. My friend asked me, “Will your son wrestle me?”

Now, my son was a quite a good high school footballer and quite fit. He had muscles where I didn’t know one could have muscles. When he arrived home from school, I said, “Howie wants to wrestle you. Please, don’t hurt him. We have to get the system running tonight, and I don’t have time to take him to the hospital.” “Sure,” he said.

My son smiled and then without warning grabbed my friend’s arm and twisted it–or tried to twist it. This Georgia Tech engineer who looked like a Georgia Tech engineer, not a street fighter, turned toward my son and gently put him to the ground. My son went for a tackle and ended up in the marigolds. “That’s it,” my wife said. “You guys get out of my flowers.” My son asked my friend, “How do you do that?”

My friend said, “Ah, grasshopper, you need to study akido with my sensei. The secret is to use use your energy to achieve my ends. It is strength from soft force. It is power without effort.”

I thought it was baloney. But that “power without effort” idea stuck in my mind. I also quite liked the phrase soft force. I thought the silliness of dojos, pajamas, and strength with minimal effort was poppycock. But there it was: My fit son gently deflected and controlled by my Georgia Tech pal and his grasshopper parody from the old TV show Kung Fu.

Then I made the connection between my friend, a math and computer whiz, and Google. I realized that the GOOG was practicing its own black art of Goo Jit Su.

This is an illustration of Googzilla, dressed in traditional garb designed to make US wrestlers chuckle, using “soft force” to throw an opponent into a tizzy. Notice that Googzilla expends little effort. The opponent is headed for a shock with his energy redirected against him. Googzille seems to be lowering the opponent to the ground almost gently. Appearances can be deceiving.

Let me explain.

Google has demonstrated for the second time in less than a year its mastery of a new form of “soft” force. I call this form of fighting “Goo Jit Su”. Instead of defining it and using those cute line drawings that show how to kill an opponent with the crane or other animal inspired technique, let me give you two examples of Goo Jit Su.

Verizon

Google is a peanut compared to Verizon. It’s not just revenue. Verizon is big. It has the AT&T pre-Judge-Green DNA in its digital marrow. Verizon understands lobbying. Verizon knows how to win government contracts. Verizon knows how to squeeze money from its customers. I heard that in Washington, DC, even the drug dealers pay their Verizon wireless bills on time. No reason to annoy Mother Verizon.

Verizon’s approach to business combat is similar to extreme martial arts–anything goes. There’s one objective: triumph.

Google pulled its Goo Jit Su on Verizon. Without any effort beyond some letter writing and hiring familiar lobbyist type drones, Verizon agreed to open its wireless spectrum. I don’t have a clue what “open” means, but as a former Bell Labs contractor, work at Bellcore, and my USWest Web work, “open” is not what phone companies do. AT&T defined “open” in one way–AT&T’s way. Verizon’s agreeing to open spectrum is tantamount to one of the Mt. Rushmore faces turning up in the Poconos.

How did Google achieve this feat with little cost, modest effort, and generally disorganized PR? The answer, “Goo Jit Su.” Google used the force of Verizon the way my friend turned a collision with my son into a romp.

Microsoft

Microsoft, like Verizon, is not really a “soft” force outfit. Microsoft likes to operate on the tank principle. Find the terrain and drive over the opposition. Netscape is the example I associate with Microsoft in the browser wars of the mid 1990s. Hard force: Microsoft crushed Netscape and told the troops, “At ease. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.”

Now Google without much effort apart from some emails, meetings, and lunches at Silicon Valley watering holes has thwarted Microsoft and cut a deal to put Google ads on the Yahoo search results. It certainly appears that regulators aren’t paying much attention to this type of tie up.

How did Google pull this off? The answer, “Goo Jit Su.”

Secrets of Goo Jit Su

I scanned the chapters in my 2005 The Google Legacy and my 2007 Google Version 2.0, and I found some information that helped explain in my mind this notion of “soft” force applied to opponents.

First, Google says it doesn’t want to take big wild swings. The company uses the opponents’ energy to direct the outcome. Google doesn’t want to compete with Office. Google doesn’t want to compete with eBay. Google doesn’t this and doesn’t that. The company defines what it won’t do and essentially creates an impression that the company is a mash up of pacifism and disorganization. With regards to large companies like Microsoft and Verizon, Google can twitch and eye brow and the foe goes into massive, visible action. This is the “give me a lever long enough and I will move the moon” approach. Little effort, big effect.

Second, Google works to explain that it is into Web search and advertising and lava lamps. You can’t read a story by a mainstream publication without references to primary colors, quirky furnishings, and those wild and crazy Googlers. Baloney. Google is laying down a layer of fog that obscures its competitive intent. Have you ever played chess or hearts with a math wizard? Those folks would crush their mother anytime, anyplace. “The whole point of a game,” I recall my math whiz friend in high school is, he told me in 1958, “to crush you like a worm.” So, a nice happy externality masks an NFL line backer mentality. Every game is the super bowl.

Third, Google exerts pressure in an opposition free world. I just don’t see much competition getting in Google’s face. For some reason, most people can’t see that Web search and advertising are applications running on Google’s real competitive advantage: the ability to scale its own private massively parallel, distributed super computer. In my forthcoming KMWorld column, for which I am indeed handsomely compensated, I talk about a new branch of science that should be taught to MBAs: Google physics. I explain how modest pressures applied in several places over time create the digital equivalent of the “touch of death”. My Georgia Tech friend loves to talk about his sensei’s alleged ability to take an index finger and render a powerful attacker a drooling lump.

Observations

I think Google has a black belt in the soft force of Goo Jit Su. Its opponents [a] don’t know they are in a fight and [b] can’t figure out how Google can thwart their forceful actions without even flicking the Googzilla tail. Until companies like Microsoft and Verizon pick up the basic skills of Goo Jit Su, it will be a tough fight after tough fight. Each will end with the loser asking, “What the heck are those Mountain View math geeks doing to us?” just as my son, sitting on his rump wondered how the geek from Georgia Tech converted the raw energy of a 17 year old into a dumbfounded kid sitting on his buttocks gasping for breath in the marigolds.

Goo Jit Su, grasshopper. Goo Jit Su.

Stephen Arnold, June 13, 2008

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