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Design philosophy from a different world

Abstract: In order to understand more fully the design philosophies and principles of Google and Apple, it is necessary to look at the companies in detail. The companies’ history, product design philosophies and principles, common grounds and differences are presented, synthesized, and analyzed.

Key words: Google, Apple, design philosophy, design principles, simplicity, user-friendly, innovation, bottom-up, top-down.

The Google style

The company

The World Wide Web impacts people’s lives in an unprecedented way. Google rules the web. It is hard to find a web user in the United States who does not regularly use Google’s products, whether a search engine (its start-up product), a map service (its flagship), or an email application (its popular program). Let us take a look at its signature product, the search engine. In 1996, two Stanford graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, built a search engine called ‘BackRub’, based on a link analysis algorithm, named PageRank after Larry Page, as part of a research project.

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In 1998 they founded Google,1 an Internet search engine company, when the search engine market was dominated by Yahoo! and crowded with a number of ambitious companies such as AltaVista, Excite, HotBot, Infoseek, Lycos, WebCrawler, just to name a few. Google’s mission is ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’2 While others were rushing to become portals, web directories, or metasearch engines, in the hope of expanding business and occupying cyberspace as extensively as possible, Google followed its mission religiously, sticking with its original homepage design, a single search box with the company’s four-color logo above it. Backed by its ultrafast search speed, this design, although simple, has proved to have a lasting effect, because web users have become so used to seeing this familiar interface as a default search ‘place to go’ that ‘just google it’ has become a much-heard recommendation. Google quickly became top player in the search engine field and went public in 2004. By the end of 2012 Google had 86.3% of the search engine market share in the United States.3

How successful has Google become as a business since its foundation in 1998? And how influential is Google in people’s lives? Consider the following facts.

In 2012, with a revenue of $37.905 billion and profit of $9.737 billion, the company was ranked 73rd among the top 500 US companies by Fortune magazine.4

Leaving financial terms aside, let’s look at Google’s influence in other fields. Both the Oxford English Dictionary (OED, electronic version) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (Eleventh Edition) added ‘Google’ as a transitive verb in 2006: ‘To enter (a search term) into the Google search engine to find information on the Internet; to search for information about (a person or thing) in this way.’ (OED); and ‘To use the Google search engine to obtain


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information about (as [sic] a person) on the World Wide Web.’ (Merriam-Webster).5 It is often regarded as an honor for a company to have its name included in dictionaries as a verb; it is rare, and tends to indicate the extent of that company’s influence in society.6 ‘Google’ was also named Word of the Decade 2000–9 by the American Dialect Society, reflecting the company’s influence and impact on society.7

Google has profoundly changed people’s way of thinking. People habitually use Google to find answers because Google is so ‘smart.’ Google even teaches people how to tell Google to get answers for them by offering a MOOC course to the world.8 The unprecedented convenience provided by Google comes with an unexpected side effect, the so-called ‘Google effect’ which is a phenomenon in information-seeking behavior in the information age. Instead of remembering where they found a piece of information by themselves before, or even where Google took them to for that information, people try to remember how they found the information via Google. ‘The Internet,’ a research report finds, ‘has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.’9 A research paper that concentrates on doctoral theses from 2004 to 2011 concludes that ‘These scientometrics findings suggest a Google effect that is indicative of a cognitive change in research students. When researchers remember where information is stored rather than the information itself, the nature of their research itself might change.’10 The super speed of Google search also develops an impatient 3-click limitation, by which anything beyond three clicks is just too many. Whether this habit is good or bad in terms of human behavioral development remains to be seen.


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The philosophy and principles

User first is the centerpiece of Google’s philosophy. It is the very first thing stated on the company’s philosophy web page, Ten Things We Know to be True: ‘Focus on the user and all else will follow.’11 In other words, if the user is satisfied (the user is king!) money will follow (i.e. financial profits from market share gains). This philosophy is at the heart of Google’s culture and is reflected in the company’s product design. Among Google’s team of designers including visual designers, interaction designers, classical designers, and usability researchers, everyone has opinions on design. However, when it comes to a difference of opinion on the design of a product, ‘the disagreement is on which path serves you-the-user-better,’ says Kevin Fox, the designer of Gmail 1.0, Google Calendar, and other products.12

Simplicity makes Google more attractive and actually more visible to users than other search engines, web portals, and web services. On its email service website, for example, it states its philosophy, ‘Experience the ease and simplicity of Gmail, everywhere you go.’ And indeed, it is better in many ways than, say, Yahoo! Mail.

Innovative is the key adjective in Google’s culture. Google famously allots employees 20% of their total time at work to pursue their own innovative projects. The Googlers dare to consider any possibility (e.g. Google Car); dare to try new things (e.g. wearable computing); actively modify to improve the product (e.g. Gmail); and are quick to discontinue if things do not work out well (e.g. iGoogle). Most technology companies have innovation built into their mindset. When Microsoft introduced its first ever hardware product, Surface Tablet, in October 2012, it was considered a bold move because Microsoft has been historically regarded as a software company. Google’s move was even bolder; they are


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trying to make an automobile. It is not an ordinary car; it is a car with passengers but without a driver. Google Car, if eventually commercially successful, will be revolutionary, and especially beneficial to disabled people.

Integrity earns trust. One of Google’s guiding principles is that it never manipulates ranking to put its business partners higher in search results and no one can buy higher PageRank. ‘You can make money without doing evil’13 is a famous Google saying. By being fair and objective, the company earns users’ trust and ‘no short-term gain could ever justify breaching that trust.’14

Do what you are good at. Concentration and focus on the signature product makes Google the leader in its core business, i.e. Internet search technology. Famous for its ranking algorithm,15 Google employs a large group of dedicated researchers whose job is to deal with search issues, solve search problems, and continually work to improve user search experience. Google believes ‘It’s best to do one thing really, really well.’16 This philosophy generates at least two advantages: (1) being able to maintain the company’s leading position in its core business area; (2) applying learned knowledge and tested methods to new products for business growth.

Openness helps develop and improve products. Google believes more brains are better than one, ‘Democracy on the web works.’17 Its open-source strategy makes many programmers all over the world powerful sources for software development, ‘where innovation takes place.’18 On the business side, Google’s practice illustrates what Cusumano describes as a successful business ‘coring’ strategy which ‘requires a leader-wannabe to resolve a major technical problem,’19 i.e., in Google’s case, web search, and then to distribute its technology as widely as possible so that it becomes an industry standard platform.


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Speed is crucial in doing business in the information age, especially in the Internet search business. The old saying ‘time is money’ may have to be changed to ‘time is more than money.’ Web users lose patience when the ‘World Wide Web’ turns out to be ‘World Wide Wait.’ Google has followed the principle of ‘Fast is better than slow’20 from day one and treats the issue of speed seriously. Google pages are simple but to the point. They are designed with none of the ‘too much information’ presentation style which may result in a slow download speed. The search engine helps you complete a sentence as you begin to type; suggests alternate words when you have made a typo; tells you how many hits there are and how long it has spent on the search; automatically copies your search term to a new search function when you switch, e.g. from Web to Translate. All these things happen in the blink of an eye, typically within a fraction of a second, all to save the user’s precious time. As Google puts it ‘our goal is to get people to leave our homepage as quickly as possible.’21

Bottom-up. A Google project requires a large number of people, designers, engineers, programmers, and experimenters for beta versions, working together and making decisions from their joint involvement. Products are designed and built using the bottom-up approach which allows more experiments along the way. A bottom-up approach begins with details and works up to the highest conceptual level. Details are from collected data. At Google, data is king. Google relies on consumer data and user feedback. Products are then constantly modified based on user data in order to improve their quality, or they are promptly discontinued, if user feedback indicates this. Decisions are data-driven, and ‘more data is better data’ is a popular maxim among Google’s engineers.22


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The infinity of information. Google believes, ‘There’s always more information out there.’23 Google and other search engines have indexed billions of web pages and they are still doing so. However, the indexed web pages or Surface Web represent only a small fraction of the whole web world. The truth is, one can hardly exhaust information on the web, because the Deep Web, or Invisible Web, is growing rapidly all the time.24 On the other hand, this means the potential of the search engine business is huge and Google is keenly aware of it.

It can always be better. Being good is not good enough. Being great is just a starting point, not an end point. There is always room for improvement. Perfectionism is in Google’s genes. This philosophy is fittingly reflected by some of its unusual long-period ‘beta’ versions of products. For example, its Gmail project started in 2002 and launched in 2004, but the ‘beta’ label remained until 2009. Its pipeline of great products is the result of the fact that ‘constant dissatisfaction with the way things are becomes the driving force behind everything we do.’25 In September 2013, at a celebration of the search engine’s 15th birthday, Google unveiled a new algorithm named Hummingbird, which moves from keyword matching to meaning matching, a fundamental improvement which will help produce more precise results.26

The Apple style

The companyIt is amazing to see how loyal, or more accurately, obsessed, Apple users are. Whenever a new Apple product is released, there is a consumer hype, you could call it ‘Apple mania’ in evidence that must make other companies jealous. It appears to be a sure thing that there will be long waiting


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lines at Apple stores worldwide on the first day of a new product sale. In September 2012, before the release of iPhone 5, J.P. Morgan’s equity analyst Michael Feroli predicted that this ‘little phone’ could potentially add from 0.25 to 0.5 percentage points to fourth quarter annualized US GDP growth.27 As if the consumers were willing to prove his point, iPhone 5 was so desired that Apple sold two million units in the first 24 hours, according to a CNBC report. The annual Macworld Expo is one of the most followed technology events, in which the late CEO Steve Jobs would deliver his signature speech introducing new products. Apple’s product design is so successful that it has become the subject of litigation. Companies have been accused or even sued by Apple on the grounds of patent infringement. According to a report in The New York Times, a federal court jury found that a number of Samsung’s mobile devices infringed on Apple’s patented designs and awarded damages of $1.05 billion to Apple.28

Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne co-founded Apple Computer, Inc. in 1976 in the Jobs family garage. Among various tales, one version says that Jobs chose ‘Apple’ as the name for the company because the apple was his favorite fruit, he had worked at a farm growing apples and his favorite rock band, the Beatles, published their music through Apple Records.29 Steve Jobs was not only a computer geek but also a visionary businessman who foresaw opportunities ahead of most people. At the time when computers were the specialty of a few people using gigantic IBM machines, Jobs spotted their commercial potential and entered the consumer market with his stylish personal computers. Apple I was introduced in 1977, followed by a number of other computer products.30 In 1980, the company went public, beginning its fluctuating journey on Wall Street. In 1984, the Apple Macintosh was


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released. Although it had limited commercial success, the Macintosh, also known as the Mac, was regarded as the first user-friendly personal computer for most people because of its graphical user interface (GUI), icons, and use of a mouse.

Steve Jobs was a dictator, and a benevolent one, as the record indicates. ‘Apple is Jobs and Jobs is Apple’ was a commonly accepted account of the relationship between the man and the company. If the Great Man theory was applicable, Steve Jobs would probably qualify as one of the great men who have had a remarkable impact in history. However, his strong and super honest personality, while charismatic and inspiring, also caused trouble for him, as he was forced out of Apple in 1985. Thereafter, the company’s businesses as well as its stock price went into a steady decline. In this near-death situation, Apple made a wise decision in 1997 to bring back its co-founder. Jobs’ second act began with a series of strategic actions. He immediately secured a $150 million investment from Microsoft, put the people who understood his philosophy in key positions, and created a culture that fit his business style. In 1998, aiming at the unlimited potential of the Internet, the iMac—‘i’ for the Internet, as Jobs explained—was introduced. It would be followed by a chain of ‘i’ products in the years to come. The launch of the iPod in 2001 marked the beginning of a new era for Apple. The idea of the iPod, a tiny, beautifully crafted device that plays music, is not an invention—Sony’s Walkman has been around for decades—but a revolution in the music business. There are two fundamental differences between a Walkman and an iPod.

(1) The iPod plays the music sold through the iTunes Store, an Apple entity, thus making money constantly.

(2) The iPod eliminates the need for a cassette or a compact disc, so that its physical size is far smaller.


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After a sensational success with the iPod, Apple introduced a stream of consumer electronics (sometimes referred to as media devices): the iPhone, Apple TV, and the iPad, products that would dramatically change people’s lifestyles. In January 2007 at Macworld in San Francisco, Steve Jobs announced that Apple Computer had decided to remove ‘Computer’ from the company’s name to reflect its new, diversified direction.31 The core business of Apple Inc. now includes personal computers, software, hardware, consumer electronics and services, making it an unparalleled business ecosystem.

As of July 2012, the company was making about $1 billion a week, and their cash flow stood at $117 billion. An historic moment came on Monday, August 20 2012, when Apple’s market capitalization reached $623.52 billion, to surpass the record of $616.34 billion set by Microsoft on December 27 1999, making Apple the most valuable company ever.32 To put the numbers in perspective, if Apple were a country, it would have approximately the 20th largest GDP among 214 countries, according to World Bank 2011 data.33 As of June 2013 Apple had created and supported nearly 600,000 jobs in the United States, according to the company’s website.

Philosophy and principles

Aesthetics above all. When one looks at an Apple product, the inevitable impression is ‘elegance.’ Apple is classified by Matt Haig as one of the ‘emotion brands,’ as he quotes Jobs’ description of candy-colored iMacs, ‘they make you want to lick them.’34 Apple cares about how products look and feel. Steve Jobs was very much into art (he audited calligraphy classes at Reed College) and liked to talk about style, taste, soul, and life (he studied Eastern spirituality, or ‘Eastern


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mysticism’ in Jobs’ own words,35 with a Zen Buddhist priest, Kobun Chino Otogawa). Jobs put all these non-technological elements into the company’s product design and treated them above money. Jobs was a perfectionist and his sense of aesthetic was total. He once rejected a proposed Mac circuit board for its ugliness, even though only service technicians would ever see the innards.36 In an interview with Playboy in 1985, Jobs said, ‘For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.’37 In another interview, the reporter wrote, ‘Great products, according to Jobs, are a triumph of taste, of “trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then trying to bring those things into what you are doing.”’38

His approach earned him the title of ‘a CEO of beauty.’39

User-friendly. Apple knows that what people want is not only a pleasing look and feel, but also ease of use. Apple’s products always stand out, with their thoughtfully designed customer interface and technologies that aim at helping users. Many of today’s common features, such as the graphical user interface (GUI), the computer mouse, the click wheel (for the iPod Classic), and the touch-sensitive glass screen (for the iPad), were introduced and popularized by Apple, as were a long list of Apple-patented technologies. The company did not invent all of them but Jobs knew how to present them on the market in a way that consumers could not resist. Because of their user-friendliness and beautiful design, these Apple features have attracted people effectively and thus, created a loyal user base. People have gained operational familiarity with Apple products through frequent use. This user population is so large that Apple products have become industry standards.

Simplicity. Less is more. Jonathan Ive, Apple’s Senior Vice President responsible for Industrial Design, explains the company’s design philosophy. ‘The way we approach design


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is by trying to achieve the most with the very least. We are absolutely consumed by trying to develop a solution that is very simple, because as physical beings we understand clarity.’40 That is not to say simple design is easy. Simple design actually requires more time, concentration, skills, details, and above all, deeper understanding of the product. ‘It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep.’41 Ive describes his philosophy, ‘You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.’42 One effective way to achieve simplicity from complexity is to eliminate unnecessary things, thus focusing on essential things. A story about the computer mouse illustrates Jobs’ obsession with simplicity. Early versions of the computer mouse, invented by Douglass Engelbart in 1964, had three buttons. When Jobs added the mouse to the Macintosh computer in 1984, he eliminated two buttons to make it ‘impossible to push the wrong one.’43 ‘Say no to 1000 things,’ as Jobs suggested.44 Apple’s products are beautiful, state-of-the-art, and yet simple. They are simple in two ways: their physical looks and their user interface. If you google the images of a Mac and a Dell PC for a comparison, you will see how clean, thin, and simple a Mac is, whereas a Dell is surrounded by too many wires, so that it looks cluttered. Apple is at an advantage because unlike Microsoft or Dell, companies that concentrate on either software (function) or hardware (the look), Apple has done both since its birth. The integration of the two segments in the design process not only improves efficiency, but also makes it easier to follow and implement a consistent design principle, as featured on Apple’s first brochure: ‘Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.’45

Top-down. While Apple shows its care for the consumer by simplifying the user interface on its products and making


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them more intuitive and user-friendly, it does not sacrifice the content. This philosophy coincides with the saying, loosely based on a remark of Einstein’s about theory, ‘everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.’ When it comes to product design Apple is famously regarded as one of the most secretive and closed companies. It pays little attention to market research. Responding to the question of whether he did market research for the iPad, Steve Jobs said, ‘None. It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.’46 It is Apple’s job to offer what the consumers need to know what they want. You never know what kind of product Apple will come up with next (and that makes Macworld events, when the company announces new products, more exciting). In a conversation with his biographer Walter Isaacson, Jobs said, ‘Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do…. People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.’47 Jobs was not the originator of this top-down design philosophy. Henry Ford allegedly said, ‘If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.’48 Akio Morita, co-founder of Sony, offered a similar opinion, saying, ‘We don’t ask consumers what they want. They don’t know. Instead we apply our brain power to what they need, and will want, and make sure we’re there, ready.’49 As a style of thinking, a top-down design approach starts with the big picture, emphasizing planning and a complete understanding of the product, and works down to the details. As a result, Apple’s products guide consumers to enjoy using them, with the likelihood of pleasant surprises, and more importantly, consumers are given the opportunity to find out what they will want, things beyond their expectation and imagination.


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Think different. This was the main theme of a hit commercial advertisement, created for Apple by advertising agency TBWA\Chiat\Day of Los Angeles in 1997, when Jobs had just returned to the company. The advertisement was so creative that it made Apple especially distinguishable from other companies. It’s about the spirit of creativity and innovation. It’s about thinking outside the box. It’s about having a visionary take on creating great products. As Jobs put it, ‘It was certainly for customers to some degree, but it was even more for Apple itself.’50 One of Jobs’ habits was to spend time on ‘the forward-looking stuff.’51 Many of Apple’s products are a result of this forward-thinking habit. For example, twenty-five years before the unveiling of the media tablet, the iPad, Jobs told a reporter that Apple would make a product that carries ‘the power of a Macintosh in something the size of a book!’52

Google and Apple styles: common features and differences

Common groundsAs two of the most successful technology companies in the world, Google and Apple have some similarities in their characteristics, philosophies, and principles.

Ambition

Ambition is the source of motivation. Google’s original mission was modest: ‘To make it easier to find high-quality information on the web.’53 Shortly after its founding, Page and Brin changed this mission to a seemingly impossible one: ‘To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’54 The key change is


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from ‘make it easier to find’ to ‘organize,’ which raises the bar much higher and thus requires much more work. Google Maps, Google Books, Google Scholar, etc. are all built in the furtherance of this grand mission.

Apple’s mission is ‘to make the best things in the world.’55 This is not limited to personal computers; the removal of the word ‘computer’ from the company’s name hinted at that. It is about anything that Apple makes and will make; be it hardware, software, or a service, the company strives to make great products and influence the future for the better. Apple wants to make ‘some significant contribution to the society at large.’56 Tim Cook, Steve Jobs’ successor, reiterated the company’s goal during an interview with Businessweek in 2012.

Innovation

One of the unusual things Google does, but most companies do not, is to grant employees 20% of their time at work to think about innovative ideas and to experiment with creative projects. Google was not the first search engine. It finally stands out from the crowd because of this innovative way of thinking.

A lot of Apple’s great products are not inventions but innovations, superseding existing products or ideas. For example, Apple did not invent the mouse and the GUI. A visit to Xerox PARC inspired Jobs; smartphones had been in existence long before the release of the iPhone. Apple just does it better, much better.

Simplicity

Simple is more powerful. The Google search engine’s page design has become a de facto imprint of the Internet because of its simplicity.


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Less is more. Apple’s product design shows no unnecessary parts. For example, on an iPad, one button controls all and a virtual keyboard doesn’t appear until you are about to type.

User-friendliness

Google cares about user experience. Google’s products are thoughtfully designed for convenience, accuracy, and efficiency. Google helps you spell; translates from Afrikaans to Yiddish (and 70 other languages in between) at your request; cites scholarly articles in major styles with a click (even highlights the citation automatically for you to copy and paste), and the list can go on and on. Google is at your service. All these are not only free of charge but also easy to use. It all starts with a single search box, which everyone is familiar with. It makes things much easier, and yes, we are surely spoiled. But who would care?

When establishing the company, Jobs’ original idea, also a brilliant business plan, was to make computers ‘personal,’ approachable by ordinary people with no professional background. He wanted to put PCs in every household. To reach this goal, user-friendliness stands as one of the company’s primary design principles. Jobs’ philosophy was that high-tech machines could be as friendly as household appliances, thus appealing to novice consumers. Apple’s products are magical and powerful. Consumers simply go by their intuition and Apple takes care of operation. We see Apple shares sky-rocketing in the stock market, but it was never Jobs’ goal to please the stockholders. The stockholders were a result of his care about the consumers.


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Differences

Although both are successful, Google and Apple are quite different in many ways.

Background

A product of the Internet, Google is young. Its business is mainly in software and Internet services.

Apple has a long company history. It almost died and was then reinvented dramatically in its co-founder Steve Jobs’ ‘second act.’ Its concentration is on both hardware and software.

Culture

Google is one of the most academically oriented companies in the world. It hires educated people with the highest-level academic degrees possible. There were 40 PhDs among Google’s first hundred engineers.57 ‘PhD a plus’ is often seen in Google’s job advertisements. The company is known for its openness. It is managed by a team of leaders.

Apple has a typical corporate culture. It is one of the most secretive companies in the world. In Jobs’ era Apple was ruled by one person. Under the new management, headed by Tim Cook, a change of culture is expected; after all, Jobs cannot be duplicated. However, to what degree the company’s culture will change remains to be seen.

Product design philosophy

Google sees what consumers want by gathering data, and constantly modifies its products to serve people better. Its


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approach in product design features data-driven decision-making, a bottom-up style.

Apple looks for what consumers will want, because consumers don’t know what they will want. The company spends 15–20% of its industrial-design time on concept.58 Apple designers enjoy the same status as engineers, if not higher. Its approach in product design features full control by a small group of designers, a top-down style.

Notes

1. Derived from the mathematical term ‘googol’ which means the number one (1) followed by one hundred zeros (0), ‘Google’ may be interpreted as carrying an ‘allusion to the large amount of information contained on the Internet.’ See ‘Google, v.2’. OED Online. Oxford University Press.

2. Google. Company overview. <http://www.google.com/intl/en/about/company/>. Accessed: March 14 2013.

3. Karma Snack. ‘Search Engine Market Share.’ <http://www.karmasnack.com/about/search-engine-market-share/>. Accessed: December 30 2012.

4. This puts Google ahead of some big names, such as Oracle, American Express, Philip Morris, etc. Source: ‘Ranked Within Industries.’ Fortune 165/7 (2012): F-33-F-40. Accessed: July 26 2012.

5. Note that Merriam-Webster Dictionary uses lower case for the verb ‘google’ but the Oxford English Dictionary retains the capitalization for the verb.

6. One such company is the Xerox Corporation. The company’s name is commonly used as a synonym for ‘photocopy’ and is included in major dictionaries.

7. The American Dialect Society Website. Permanent link at: <http://www.americandialect.org/2009_word_of_the_year_is_tweet_word_of_the_decade_is_google>. Accessed: March 22 2013.


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8. Google launched its first MOOC course ‘Power Searching with Google’ in July 2012, with 155,000 registered students. (The figure is from The Chronicle of Higher Education’s website at: <http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/google-releases-open-source-online-education-software/39882>. Accessed: September 21 2013.) The six-unit course, taught by Dr. Daniel Russell, Senior Research Scientist at Google, went into considerable detail on how to do a really effective Google search.

9. Sparrow, Betsy, Jenny Liu and Daniel M. Wegner (2011). ‘Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips.’ Science 333, August 5: 776–8

10. Lav R. Varshney (2012). ‘The Google Effect in Doctoral Theses.’ Scientometrics 92/3: 792.

11. Google. Ten things we know to be true. <http://www.google.com/about/company/philosophy/>. Accessed: March 22 2013.

12. Fox Kevin (2009). ‘Google design: The kids are alright. [sic]’ Blog post at Fury.com. <http://fury.com/2009/03/google-design-the-kids-are-alright/>. Accessed: March 28 2013.

13. Google. Ten things we know to be true.14. Ibid.15. Google believes in logic. It even uses its algorithms to recruit

and retain more women. See ‘Search and replace: Facing losses in female talent, Google offers an algorithm.’ The New York Times August 23 2012: B1. (published online as ‘In Google’s Inner Circle, a Falling Number of Women’.)

16. Google. Ten things we know to be true.17. Ibid.18. Ibid. 19. Cusumano, Michael A. (2010). Staying Power: 51. Oxford,

UK: Oxford University Press. 20. Google. Ten things we know to be true.21. Ibid. 22. Stross, Randall (2008). Planet Google: 15. London, UK:

Atlantic Books.23. Google. Ten things we know to be true.


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24. As of the end of 2006, search engines were said to crawl only 16–20 percent of the Internet. That means at least 80 percent of it was not indexed by the search engines, according to an online article, ‘The Ultimate Guide to the Invisible Web’ in Open Education Database. <http://oedb.org/library/college-basics/invisible-web>. Accessed: May 1 2013. (This article may be updated from time to time.)

25. Google. Ten things we know to be true.26. A report in The New York Times describes this, the ‘biggest’

change since 2000. Claire Cain Miller. ‘Google unveils a new approach to searches.’ The New York Times September 27 2013, B2. (Published online as ‘Google Alters Search to Handle More Complex Queries.’)

27. Feroli, Michael (2012). ‘Can one little phone impact GDP?’ <https://mm.jpmorgan.com/EmailPubServlet?doc=GPS-938711-0.html&h=-825pgod>. Accessed: May 21 2013.

28. Chen, Brian X. and Lisa Alcalay Klug (2012). ‘A verdict that alters an industry.’ The New York Times, August 25: B1.

29. Imbimbo, Anthony (2009). Steve Jobs: 51. New York, NY: Gareth Stevens.

30. As a collectable vintage computer, at an auction in Germany on May 25 2013 an original Apple I fetched the whopping sum of $671,400, a record at the time, reported ZDNet. <http://www.zdnet.com/apple-i-computer-fetches-671400-at-german-auction-7000015806/>. Accessed: September 4 2013.

31. Not directly related, but in the late twentieth century, a similar strategic move had been made in library science schools as a result of the changes in the information environment. Most of the library schools dropped ‘library’ from their school names and added ‘information’, to reflect the new direction that the library science education programs were now taking.

32. It should be noted that this is only an absolute dollar value. Apple would have to reach $850 billion to surpass Microsoft with adjustment for inflation.

33. World Bank. ‘GDP ranking.’ <http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/GDP-ranking-table>. Accessed: May 21 2013.


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34. Haig, Matt (2004). Brand Royalty: How the World’s Top 100 Brands Thrive and Survive: 189. London, UK: Kogan Page. (Republished 2011 as Brand Success).

35. Sheff, David (1985). ‘Playboy interview: Steve Jobs.’ Playboy February: 49.

36. Lohr, Steve (1997). ‘Creating Jobs.’ New York Times Magazine January 12.

37. Sheff, David. ‘Playboy interview.’ Playboy. (See above.)38. Lohr, Steve. ‘Creating Jobs.’ New York Times Magazine (See

above.)39. Kelly, Kevin (2013). ‘The soul of Apple.’ Blog post at qideas.org.

<http://www.qideas.org/blog/the-soul-of-apple.aspx>. Accessed: May 24 2013.

40. Gallo, Carmine (2010). The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs: 137. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

41. Isaacson, Walter (2011). Steve Jobs: 343. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.

42. Ibid.43. Markoff, John (2013). ‘Computer visionary who invented the

mouse.’ The New York Times July 4: A1.44. Burrows, Peter (2004). ‘The seed of Apple’s innovation.’

Businessweek Online October 11. Accessed: June 3 2013.45. Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs: 127. (See above.)46. Lohr, Steve (2012). ‘The Yin and the Yang of corporate

innovation.’ The New York Times January 29: BU3. As a matter of fact, Steve Jobs voiced this product design philosophy on several occasions.

47. Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs: 567. (See above.)48. Although William Clay ‘Bill’ Ford Jr. quoted his great-

grandfather in 2006 (see Quote Investigator at: <http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/07/28/ford-faster-horse/>; accessed: June 4 2013), the authenticity of the quotation is still in question. Nevertheless, it is such a great line that many people quote it both because it is snappy and easily remembered, and because it reflects their own ‘top-down’ philosophy.

49. Business Insider. <http://www.businessinsider.com/we-dont-ask-consumers-what-they-want-they-dont-know-instead-we-


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apply-our-brain-power-to-what-they-need-and-will-want-and-make-sure-were-there-ready-2010-4>. Accessed: June 4 2013.

50. Burrows, Peter. ‘The seed of Apple’s innovation.’ Businessweek Online (See above.)

51. Ibid. 52. Sheff, David. ‘Playboy interview.’ Playboy. (See above.)53. Stross, Randall. Planet Google: 9. (See above.)54. See Note 2.55. Burrows, Peter. ‘The seed of Apple’s innovation.’ Businessweek

Online. (See above.)56. Tyrangiel, Josh (2012). ‘Tim Cook’s freshman year’ (cover

story). Bloomberg Businessweek, December 6: 66.57. Stross, Randall Planet Google: 14. (See above.)58. Turner, Daniel (2007). ‘The Secret of Apple Design.’ MIT

Technology Review, May. Web. <http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/407782/the-secret-of-apple-design/>. Accessed: June 12 2013.